Dear Deborah,

I want to say more about a topic that interests us both: How to create an accountability system that empowers excellent educators to create top-notch schools while ensuring a basic level of quality for everyone.

It’s a real dilemma, because what might work in a hothouse setting (especially lots of professional autonomy) has tended to disappoint when taken to scale.

That’s not easy for me to admit. My first education enthusiasm was the notion of autonomy and uber-local control, as epitomized in Chicago’s “local school councils” of the early 1990s. I wrote my college thesis on the topic (with the help of the University of Michigan’s great David Cohen), and came away convinced that educator autonomy, plus parental choice, would lead us to the Promised Land. (Professor Cohen knew better!)

A few years later, I landed at the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, where we embraced the “let a thousand flowers bloom” mantra of the early charter schools movement. I helped plant a few of said flowers in our hometown of Dayton, Ohio—flowers that turned out to be, err, more like skunk cabbage.

It was a disaster. Well, not a total disaster. A few of those charter schools (in Ohio and elsewhere) turned out to be quite good. KIPP. Amistad Academy. The Met. High Tech High.

But many, many more turned out mediocre, or worse.

What was the problem? We’d cleared away the soul-sucking union contracts and much of the mindless bureaucracy. We’d empowered educators to do their thing and let the magic happen. Yet many flopped.

It wasn’t just the test scores—though those were often pretty pitiful. Anyone who visited the schools could see with their own eyes that there wasn’t much there there—the curriculum (if they had one) was disorganized or incoherent, the teaching was inconsistent (at best) and nonexistent (at worse), the culture was weak. The schools were often small, safe, and welcoming—virtues, all—but you couldn’t say much more about them without wanting to cry.

This period of the charter movement yielded difficult lessons—but which lessons is still debated. Did it just show that nothing works—that poverty is too much of a barrier for anyone to overcome? (Most of these early charters in most states were serving overwhelmingly poor students.) Were the charters simply underfunded—money matters after all!—and just needed more resources to succeed? Did it prove that “decentralization” and “professional autonomy” are misguided—and that what we need is more centralization and control, like some systems overseas?

My own take is that freedom—for educators to do their work and for parents to choose an environment that’s right for their children—is necessary, but not sufficient, for the creation of excellent schools. That it’s “necessary” is obvious by looking at what happens in highly controlled, regimented systems in the United States or around the world. These systems can bring a certain degree of quality control to the task and make sure that outright failures (educational, fiscal, or otherwise) don’t happen. But it’s hard to find an “excellent” school in a command-and-control system. That’s because of a simple fact of human psychology: We hate being told what to do.

But removing all strings isn’t sufficient to get you excellence, either. You can’t just empower anyone—you have to empower a team of people who actually know what they are doing. And these people, collectively, must have the capacity to run a great school. They need to have a coherent pedagogical vision, know how to build a curriculum, know how to create a positive school culture, know how to build and follow a sensible budget, know how to put reasonable “internal controls” in place, know how to recruit a great staff, and on and on. These people, it turns out, are scarcer than I had realized at age 22.

And then you have to hold these schools accountable for getting strong results with kids. That brings us back to the question of measurements. I think the charter movement had it right from the get-go: Each school would have its own “charter” spelling out the results that it would be responsible for achieving, and these metrics could be customized to the school. More traditional schools might have been happy to use test scores, but more progressive ones might use something else—say, their graduates’ success at the next level of schooling. (Deborah, how do you think about this for a school like Mission Hill, whose test scores are pretty mediocre? Is it how well their students do in high school?)

Then came the modern standards-testing-accountability movement with its emphasis on uniform achievement measures, culminating in No Child Left Behind. Here those of us in the charter movement made a mistake. We quickly agreed to be part of the “same accountability system” as other public schools, which meant that those customized “charters” mostly went out the window; the measures that mattered were the test scores and nothing but. We did this for understandable and strategic reasons—imagine the outcry from charter opponents if charters didn’t have to sweat the tests!—but it was a step backward nonetheless. And it led, predictably, to less pedagogical diversity in the charter movement, which came to be increasingly dominated by “traditional” models of schools.

So now what? Let me make a modest proposal for how to design an accountability system going forward; I think you might actually like it!

1. First, as the default system, we keep something like we have today, but with better standards and tests. (Yes, common-core standards and tests.) Students are tested annually; schools are held accountable for making solid progress from September to June, with greater progress expected for students who are further behind. States and districts give these schools lots of assistance—with curriculum development, teacher training, and the like. Such a default system won’t lead to widespread excellence, but it will continue to raise the floor so that the “typical” school in America becomes better than it is today. (NB: I’d scrap any state-prescribed “accountability” below the level of the school. In other words, no more rigid teacher evaluation systems; leave personnel issues to the principals.) And it would provide taxpayers an assurance that they are getting a “public good” from their investment in public education (namely, a reasonably educated citizenry).

2. Then we offer all public schools—district and charter—an opt-out alternative. They can propose to the state or its surrogate that they be held accountable to a different set of measures. My preferences would be those related to the long-term success of their graduates. School “inspections” could be part of the picture, too. These evaluation metrics would be rigorous, but designed to be supportive of, rather than oppositional to, the cause of excellent schools. And they might be particularly important to educators of a more progressive, anti-testing bent.

How about it, Deborah? The “default” system would keep schools from being bad, and might even help most schools be good. And the “alternative” system would unleash our best educators to go for great.

Deal?

-Michael Petrilli

This article originally appeared on the Bridging Differences blog, where Mike Petrilli will be debating Deborah Meier for the next month.

Tim was a guiding force behind the seminal publication The Widget Effect and played a major role in the production of other top-flight TNTP reports like The Irreplaceables and Leap Year.

Earlier in his career he was a TFA corps member (having taught in Baltimore) and helped establish and expand the New York City Teaching Fellows program. With TNTP CEO Ariela Rozman (another total star), he received the 2012 Harold W. McGraw, Jr. Prize in Education.

If future interviews turn out half as well as Tim’s, I’ll be thrilled. We learn a great deal, and the subject’s smarts, curiosity, and humility shine through. He even enlightens us about Garry Wills and Stan Musial.

As a matter of fact, the totality is so good that I’m willing to look past his grievous error about Sandy Koufax (he only had 165 career wins!).

Ladies and gentlemen, Tim Daly.

1.   How would you summarize the key findings of Leap Year, TNTP’s latest report?

It’s sort of a combination of a study and a tell-all. The basic finding is that the first year is not a warm up lap—it’s a very strong signal of how a teacher will perform in the future. If we use multiple tools to follow a teacher’s early progress, we have a good idea of whether that person should continue in the profession. Other studies have shown this by looking at large populations of teachers, but we demonstrated it in the real world by launching programmatic shifts in more than a dozen cities.

It’s also the story of our quest to do a better job of bringing excellent teachers to schools that desperately need them. We have a mission. If we aren’t doing the things that will achieve it, we need to change. But how? We thought we’d share our approach.

2.   One interesting lesson is that we should probably invest in more observers, not more observations. Can you say more about that?

This is a finding that echoes the Gates MET research. When you send the same person each time to see a teacher, you don’t maximize reliability because whatever tendencies the observer has are consistently projected onto the teacher. In some ways you are learning more and more about the observer, not the teacher. We also see in many cases that the same observer rates the teacher higher and higher with each visit, while you don’t see that with varied observers. The most useful observational portrait is a combination of multiple visits AND multiple visitors.

3.   In recent years, thanks to the MET Project, TNTP’s The Widget Effect, and other research, we’ve learned a great deal about educator effectiveness. Thanks to Leap Year, we’re wiser about the first year of teaching. Taking all of this into account, what does the ideal state teacher-certification system look like?

This is a policy issue where our instincts and the evidence can point in opposite directions. We all want to hold a high bar for entry into teaching. It’s a reasonable assumption that asking candidates to jump through all sorts of hoops before becoming teachers is going to improve quality. But the evidence just doesn’t support it. A lot of the candidates who jump through the hoops don’t become good teachers and some of the candidates who come through streamlined avenues do very well. It leads us to conclude that up-front certification should be lightweight and simple—designed to exclude only those who don’t even deserve a tryout in teaching. On the other hand, ongoing re-certification should be much more rigorous, as we should expect that many teachers will fail to meet our standards on the job and should not become career educators.

4.   Why do you think some of the nation’s “new-and-improved” teacher-evaluation systems continue to rate the vast majority of teachers as effective or better? Given all of the time, money, and energy spent on evaluation reform, should we be concerned that meaningful differentiation is still elusive?

Yes, we should be concerned, but not surprised. We argued in The Widget Effect that the problem wasn’t just the evaluation systems, it was a culture that refused to see the differences in instructional skill that were right before our eyes. The new systems provide a better support structure to assess and develop instruction, and they usually remove prohibitions against consideration of student learning. But they do not by themselves change culture. All of us, as educators, are responsible for that culture. We must take ownership of the systems and use them as they were intended to be used.

5.   What current TNTP projects are you most excited about? Are there any particular state or district engagements that seem especially promising?

As a follow up to The Irreplaceables, we’ve done a survey of elite teachers nationally – mostly folks who’ve won prestigious awards—to learn more about their experiences and perspectives on policy issues. We’ll publish the results later this year, but one thing that stands out clearly is that when we talk about what “teachers” think, we’re probably oversimplifying because they have such diverse views about so many issues. I’ve lost track of how many findings surprised me.

Also, we’re about to name the second group of Fishman Prize winners. This is one of my absolute favorite things we do at TNTP. It’s a $25,000 prize for teachers in Title I public schools that’s named for Shira Fishman, a high school math teacher in DC. The winners spend the summer working with us and writing about their classroom practice.

6.   My sources tell me that you are an inveterate number cruncher—that, all things being equal, you’d prefer to be analyzing data. Have those hours taught you any overarching lessons about research, advocacy, or policy? Any particularly memorable “a-ha!” from one of these long, solitary journeys through a spreadsheet?

I plead guilty. I like to review evidence myself because I can ask all the questions I want without bothering someone else…and I usually have an annoying number of questions. I would say the number one thing I’ve learned is not to believe things you hear—not without checking. People repeat things at conferences that they believe to be true, but often they misheard someone else say it or they are slightly (and often unintentionally) exaggerating it. Or they are presenting anecdotes as data. When you dig, you find that far fewer things are “true,” meaning they hold up to scrutiny, but they are more interesting and challenging than things tossed around as conventional wisdom.

A good example is the idea that new teachers struggle, but with time they get better. That seems entirely reasonable because it’s consistent with what we observe in our own experiences and with research, which says second year teachers are better than first year teachers. But when you look at the data in detail, it’s more complex than that. This was one of my “A-ha!” moments, as you call them.

I was looking at trend data on a group of new teachers and I realized that some of them stagnated very early in their careers or even declined temporarily. Because they didn’t master basic skills, they adopted bad habits to get by that caused them to fall so far behind their peers that they couldn’t catch up, even a year or two later. So yes, new teachers get better, but you can’t just assume it will happen, or that they will all get better. I still remember staring at my computer screen, trying to make sense of what I was seeing.

7.   More under-rated hitter: Jimmie Foxx or Stan Musial? Better left-handed pitcher: Warren Spahn or Sandy Koufax?

Stan Musial. I am fatally biased because I’m a Cardinals fan but Musial is one of the most accomplished, consistent, and balanced hitters in baseball history. Just for a start, he had over 3,600 hits—that’s a staggering number, Tony Gwynn didn’t even have 3,200—and he had the same number at home and on the road. But he also hit almost 500 home runs. Pete Rose may have had more hits but he had only 160 home runs.

For pitchers, I’m going to say Koufax but it’s apples and oranges. Spahn is so much more accomplished over his career but Koufax was as untouchable for a period of time as anyone has ever been. That stretch of domination is fascinating to me—especially since he was magical right to the day of his retirement.

8.   In my experience most number crunchers are simply very curious people. If you look back on your intellectual development, what big ideas, books, or thinkers (whether education reform–related or not) influenced you the most?

I took a couple of classes with Garry Wills, a historian, when I was an undergraduate and he had a huge influence on me. He has such a knack for laying out deep arguments simply and supporting them with evidence that is more far reaching and comprehensive than anyone else. He’s written authoritatively on everything from performances of Macbeth to the Gettysburg Address to the Catholic Church. His background was as a classicist. In his books he often goes back to original Greek or Latin sources and translates them for himself when he is writing about them. I’ve never forgotten that commitment to inspecting each fragment. And on top of that, he taught me to appreciate Martin Scorsese films.

9.   If I had TNTP’s senior staff and board in a room, I’d try to convince you that no matter how smart or effective your team, you’ll never be able to make the urban district succeed. I’d tell you to reallocate your resources to expanding great schools and helping create great new schools in the charter sector and developing policies and support organizations for this new system of schools. After you had me escorted from the building, what would you say to your colleagues?

This is a worthy debate to have. After decades of trying, how many large urban districts can say they systematically expand opportunities for the families they serve? The alternative is to focus on expanding the number of seats in good schools. Except I don’t think these things are mutually exclusive. On our good days, we help districts see that they can think just as aggressively about creating conditions to grow excellent schools as the charter sector. They can empower leaders to assemble cohesive teams and establish college as a core expectation for students. There are districts out there trying to think boldly, and if they succeed, they can create conditions for a lot of good schools to thrive at once. My view is that just as charters are competing with and reacting to districts, districts can compete with and react to the charter sector. They have a role to play.

10.   Your brother is an assistant coach with the NFL’s Minnesota Vikings, meaning he gets to have football conversations with future Hall-of-Famers Adrian Peterson and Jared Allen. You, on the other hand, are forced to have conversations about spreadsheets with me. Ever feel like the universe is really, really unfair?

He’s my older brother and I look up to him in a million ways…but never more so than on a Sunday afternoon when he has a ground-level view of Adrian Peterson breaking away on a long run. However, each of us has a place in the universe, and apparently mine is among the spreadsheets.

-Andy Smarick

This interview first appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

The differences in expectations for students across states are striking.  In 2011, for example, Alabama reported that 77 percent of its 8th grade students were proficient in math, while the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests administered that same year indicated that just 20 percent of Alabama’s 8th graders were proficient against NAEP standards.  In Massachusetts, on the other hand, roughly the same share of 8th graders achieved proficiency on the state test (52 percent) as did so on the NAEP (51 percent).  In other words, Alabama deemed 25 percent more of its students proficient than did Massachusetts despite the fact that its students performed at markedly lower levels when evaluated against a common standard.  U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has gone so far as to accuse states like Alabama of “lying to children and parents” by setting low expectations for student performance.

There’s no doubt that the definition of proficiency in many states provides a misleading view of the extent to which students are prepared for success in college or careers.  Yet whether the way in which states define proficiency matters for student achievement is far from clear.  As Tom Loveless demonstrated in the 2012 Brown Center Report on American Education, the rigor of state proficiency definitions is largely unrelated to the level of student achievement on the NAEP across states.   Similarly, Russ Whitehurst and Michelle Croft have shown that the quality of state standards (as assessed by third party organizations) is unrelated to NAEP scores, a finding confirmed by the Harvard Kennedy School’s Josh Goodman in an analysis that examined the effects of changes in the quality of standards within states over time.  The lack of  a systematic relationship between either the rigor or the quality of state standards and student achievement casts doubt on claims that higher and better standards under the Common Core will, in and of themselves, spur higher student achievement.

Less attention has been paid to whether the rigor of state standards matters for public perceptions of the quality of the schools in their states and local communities.  If using a more lenient definition of proficiency leads citizens to evaluate their schools more favorably, then the advent of common expectations under the Common Core could alter public perceptions quite dramatically – perhaps increasing pressure for reform in regions of the country in which state proficiency definitions have provided an inflated view of student accomplishment.  Is such an outcome likely?

To shed light on this question, I use data from two surveys conducted in 2011 and 2012 under the auspices of Education Next and the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University.  In each year, my colleagues and I asked a nationally representative sample of roughly 2,500 Americans to grade the public schools in their local community on a standard A-F scale.  In the figures below, I examine whether the average grade the residents of each state assigned to their local schools is associated with the share of 2011 8th graders deemed proficient by the state’s own test and by the NAEP.  To the extent that differences in the definition of proficiency from one state to the next interfere with citizens’ ability to discern the performance of their local schools, we should see that the average grades citizens assign their schools hew more closely to proficiency rates as determined by state tests than by the NAEP.

The figures demonstrate the opposite.  Figure 1a shows that average citizen ratings of local schools across states are only weakly correlated with 8th grade proficiency rates on state tests.  Although the relationship is statistically significant, it is quite small in size: a 10-percentage-point increase in the share of students deemed proficient is associated with an increase in citizen ratings of just 0.03 points on a GPA-style scale (i.e., A=4.0; F=0).  Figure 1b, in contrast, reveals a markedly stronger relationship between citizen ratings and NAEP proficiency rates, with a 10-percentage-point increase in proficiency associated with an increase in citizen ratings of 0.17 grade points.

Figure 1a: Relationship between the Average Grades Assigned to Local Public Schools and Proficiency Rates on State Tests

Click to enlarge

Figure 1b: Relationship between the Average Grades Assigned to Local Public Schools and Proficiency Rates on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)

Click to enlarge

Source: Author’s calculations based on data from the 2011 and 2012 EdNext-PEPG Surveys, state education agency websites, and the NAEP Data Explorer.

Notes: Average grades are reported on a standard GPA scale (i.e., A=4, F=0).  State and NAEP proficiency rates are the average of 8th grade proficiency rates in math and reading.  The regression analyses used to generate fitted values are weighted by the inverse of each observation’s estimated variance to account for differences in the number of respondents from each state; unweighted regressions yield substantively similar results.

A simple regression of the average grades citizens assign to local schools in each state on NAEP and state proficiency rates simultaneously confirms that average grades (1) are strongly correlated with NAEP proficiency rates and (2) after controlling for NAEP proficiency rates, have no relationship whatsoever with proficiency rates on state tests.   An increase in NAEP proficiency rates of 32 percentage points – the difference between Washington DC and Massachusetts – is associated with an increase in citizen ratings of more than a half of a letter grade.  Holding NAEP scores constant, a difference in state test proficiency rates matters not at all.

In short, this evidence suggests that Americans have been wise enough to ignore the woefully misleading information about student proficiency rates generated by state testing systems when forming judgments about the quality of their state’s schools.  This does not mean that they ignore state testing data altogether.  Indeed, Matthew Chingos, Michael Henderson and I have shown that, within a given state, the grades citizens assign to specific elementary and middle schools are highly correlated with state proficiency rates in those schools.  Nor does it necessarily imply that information from the NAEP has a causal effect on perceptions of school quality.  The relationship between NAEP performance and the grades citizens assign their schools could easily be driven by other variables, such as the prosperity level of the state, that influence student achievement levels and could also influence school grades.  Yet it does suggest that the implementation of the Common Core, by providing information about performance against a common standard, may have less of an impact on public perceptions of school quality than many have projected.

—Martin West

This blog entry first appeared on the Brown Center Chalkboard from the Brookings Institution.

The audience took to Twitter to voice vehement disagreement, and my co-emcee and I—we were just as surprised as everyone else—did our best to distance ourselves from the remarks and hit the reset button on the evening.

To be clear, inviting controversial and provocative comments with which one may disagree is entirely appropriate at an education conference. Open debate and free speech are important. In my opinion though, they belong in the context of the conference—in which people have the opportunity to debate them—not at a closing awards dinner meant to cap a once-again successful and high-spirited conference on innovation in education. For an education technology sector struggling to fight the erroneous claim by some that it’s “tech or teachers,” choosing Kessler to deliver the closing keynote at a feel-good awards dinner was tone deaf and felt like an endorsement of his message, not a speech meant to provoke debate and discussion.

What’s clear to many of us who work in the edtech field is that we need to replace the word “or” with the word “and.” As former West Virginia Gov. Bob Wise often says, “Digital learning erases the line between high tech or high teach.”

With that all said, Kessler’s keynote got me thinking. He made some points with which the edtech sector—and the field of education more generally—should grapple and not simply sweep under the rug.

Kessler argued that whenever a truly transformational disruptive innovation has come along, it hasn’t just wiped out a whole set of businesses, it wipes out a whole sector of jobs. One example he gave was switchboard operators. When computerized dialing systems were introduced, they replaced the need for manual telephone switchboards and, consequently, the switchboard operators that ran them.

But what was unfortunate was the part of the story Kessler left out of his talk. Even as the shift to computerized dialing systems famously wiped out the jobs of switchboard operators, it created enormous job growth in new types of jobs that often involved more skill and paid better. There were of course the direct jobs—the people who built the switches and the switching systems and those who designed, integrated, and managed the software. But the new, better phone system also enabled new applications—ranging from simple touch-tone ordering systems to, ultimately, the Internet—which supported an entirely new set of commercial opportunities and jobs.

The omission is a big mistake because although the analogy is imperfect, there are parallels to education. As blended learning grows in K–12 education, it is not eliminating teachers, but eliminating certain traditional job functions of teachers. This change in the role of the teacher is, as others and I have noted, in part about allowing computers to do what computers do well to free up teachers to do what only humans can do.

Teachers—or whatever people in the future want to call mission-critical adults who guide and inspire students—will remain vital. But they will likely be doing different things. And we’re still learning about what those things will be.

It appears likely that there will be more room for teachers to focus on deeper learning by working with students on higher-order skills and the application of knowledge in rich projects. Teachers should spend less time handling mundane administrative tasks that suck up time and less time delivering one-size-fits-none lesson plans. Teachers will have far more time to work with students one-on-one and in small groups and target their interactions in more meaningful ways.

In many blended-learning schools today, the roles of teachers are also being unbundled. Some teachers serve as content experts and others as mentors and learning coaches. Some focus on tutoring, whereas others specialize in small-group projects or on making the learning relevant to the outside world. Still others act as case workers or counselors (but actually spend the majority of their day in the learning environment with students) to focus on the non-academic problems—like food, health, or emotional issues—that too often trip up students (and sadly receive short shrift in many schools today).

At Rocketship Education, the unbundling of a teacher’s job has helped pay teachers more. And at Summit Public Schools, they talk about teaching as a team sport. Gone are the days of isolating teachers; in are teachers working together with students in large learning environments that look nothing like classrooms.

The recent infographic, Blended Learning & The Teaching Profession, from Digital Learning Now!, nails the point when it says that “blended learning can create new career opportunities and improved conditions for teachers. As student roles evolve within a more personalized, tech-rich learning environment, teacher roles should evolve accordingly.” Most teachers in blended-learning settings say that there is no way they could go back to teaching in a traditional classroom.

So maybe Kessler isn’t completely wrong. Teaching, as we know it in today’s factory-model education system, may go away. What seems clear though is that we will need teachers, just in new roles. And to transition successfully to a student-centric system powered by digital learning, those teachers will need to be contributing in more meaningful and rewarding ways than ever before.

-Michael Horn

This blog entry first appeared at Forbes.com

Behind the Headline
Michelle Rhee on Radical
Education Next podcast |April 2013

Reviewing her new book for The New Republic, Nick Lemann wonders why Michelle Rhee has become the standard bearer for education reform. Mike Petrilli interviewed Rhee about the book for the most recent edition of the Education Next book club podcast.

-Education Next

Consider today’s realities. Private K-12 enrollments are shrinking — by almost 13 percent from 2000 to 2010. Catholic schools are closing right and left. The Archdiocese of Philadelphia, for example, announced in January that 44 of its 156 elementary will cease operations next month. (A few later won reprieves.) In addition, many independent schools (day schools and especially boarding schools) are having trouble filling their seats — at least, filling them with their customary clientele of tuition-paying American students. Traditional nonprofit private colleges are also challenged to fill their classroom seats and dorms, to which they’re responding by heavily discounting their tuitions and fees for more and more students.

Meanwhile, charter school enrollments are booming across the land. The charter share of the primary-secondary population is five percent nationally and north of twenty percent in 25 major cities. “Massive open online courses” (MOOCs) are booming, too, and online degree and certificate options proliferating. Public-sector college and university enrollments remain strong and now educate three students out of four. The “proprietary” (i.e. for-profit) sector of postsecondary education is doing okay, despite its tortured relationship with federal financial aid.

What’s really happening here are big structural changes across the industry as the traditional model of private education — at both levels — becomes unaffordable, unnecessary, or both, and as more viable options for students and families present themselves. While unemployment remains high, the marginal advantage of investing thirty or fifty thousand dollars a year in private schooling is diminishing, particularly when those dollars are invested in low-selectivity, lower-status private institutions. Recent analyses by AIR’s Mark Schneider and Brookings’s Stephanie Owen and Isabel Sawhill make it explicit:

People who attended the most selective private schools [colleges/universities] have a lifetime earnings premium of over $620,000. …For those who attended a minimally selective or open-admission private school, the premium is only a third of that….[P]ublic schools tend to have higher ROIs than private schools, and more selective schools offer higher returns than less selective ones.

Alterations in the housing market may also play a role where K-12 private schools are concerned. Not long ago, one could live in a nice house in the city for a lot less than a nice house in the suburbs — and spend the money saved on private schooling for one’s kids. In gentrifying cities, however, that’s no longer so. Now one must pay more for a house in the city plus private school for the children. Thus, more parents are saying, “Forget it, I’ll go public — provided the public sector can be made to supply me with a good charter or magnet school, or a virtual-education supplement to a decent neighborhood school.”

Three factors keep all these changes from being more visible and talked about.

First, of course, they’re gradual, and thus (proverbially) difficult to perceive. Second, it’s not in the interest of private schools or colleges to acknowledge that they have a problem — lest it create the educational equivalent of a run on the bank, with clients fleeing for fear of being abandoned after a sudden collapse. Much of the allure of private schools, after all, is based on their reputations, which they work hard to sustain. Hence they maintain a brave front while quietly shrinking, discounting — and recruiting full-pay students from wealthy families in other lands, particularly in Asia.

Third, elite private institutions are doing just fine, many besieged by more applicants than ever before. The wealthiest Americans can easily afford them and are ever more determined to secure for their children the advantages that come with attending them. And at the K-12 level, a disproportionate fraction of those wealthy people live in major cities where the public school options are unappealing. So we’re not going to see an enrollment crisis anytime soon at Brown, Amherst, or Duke, nor at Andover, Sidwell Friends, or Trinity. Indeed, New York’s new Avenues School is able to fill its classes with families willing and able to pay its staggering $43,000 per annum.

Because these elite schools and colleges are also highly visible — and where the “chattering classes” want (and can afford) to enroll their own daughters and sons — they create a façade of private-sector vitality. Behind it, however, like the Wizard of Oz’s curtain and Potemkin’s building facades, there is much weakness, a weakness that probably afflicts the vast majority of today’s private schools and colleges.

Is this situation reversible? And should it be a matter of concern for education reformers and policymakers?

Most other modern countries have essentially melded their private-education sectors into their systems of public financing — and have accepted the tradeoffs that accompany such financing, namely government regulation of curriculum, teacher credentialing, student admissions and more. We can see early examples of this in the U.S., too, as vouchers gradually spread and private schools accommodate themselves to the state testing regimes and other rules that come with such financing.

This is apt to be a limited remedy, however, due to American church-state entanglement anxieties that other countries don’t share; prohibitions in many state constitutions that make such public financing difficult or impossible; and our conviction that what’s valuable about private education is its freedom to be different. The policy dilemma is whether different-ness is precious enough, if with it comes gradual erosion of the “different” sector itself.

One can also fairly ask whether U.S. private schools and colleges are really all that different from their public-sector counterparts. In practice, their education-delivery model is practically indistinguishable, save for the accoutrements that the wealthiest of them can buy (trips to faraway lands, nifty technology, tiny classes, etc). There is, however, a difference where religion is concerned: Just 22.8 percent of K-12 private-school students are in secular schools, while about 32 percent of all private college students are enrolled in religiously affiliated institutions. In less prosperous schools and colleges, religion may, at day’s end, be the only real difference between public and private — and the return on that investment, while perhaps significant, cannot be easily measured.

Changing the delivery system might serve to make private education both more affordable and more different, and signs of such change are already evident, but rarely in the traditional nonprofit portions of the private sector. Instead, the boldest innovations are coming from entrepreneurs, most of them profit-seeking and most of them delivering instruction (and more) via technology rather than face-to-face in brick buildings that are open just six or eight hours a day for 180 or so days a year.

Or elite universities — the ones that are still thriving and would continue to thrive without these changes — are, themselves, innovating — mostly for students other than their own. The MITs and Stanfords are teaming up with the Courseras and Udacitys — educational technology companies specializing in online education — to offer online courses to thousands. Udacity has put a toe into the K-12 waters, both by partnering with local school systems and by inviting students to enroll directly in its college-level courses. Nor is it likely to stop there. Indeed, I expect “St. Paul’s math” and “Dalton‘s literature” in time to echo across the land, too. If current trends continue, we’re going to see a bi-modal system develop, with public schools (including charter schools) and ultra-elite private schools monopolizing the education space as the plethora of smaller private and parochial schools that once fell between them gradually fade away.

Can run-of-the-mill private schools and colleges reboot? Can they change themselves — including both their delivery systems and their cost structures — enough to brighten their own futures? I wouldn’t bet a year’s tuition on it.

—Chester E. Finn, Jr.

This post originally appeared in The Atlantic.

Come out upon my seas
Cursed missed opportunities
Am I a part of the cure?
Or am I part of the disease?”
-Coldplay, “Clocks,” A Rush of Blood to the Head, 2002

Dear Deborah,

I am haunted by the title of your post:
“The Testing Obsession Widens the Gap” Could this possibly be true? Is test-based school reform reducing opportunity for America’s neediest children? Is everything for which we school reformers fight actually making things worse? Am I a part of the cure, or am I part of the disease?

###

“It’s OK to ask: ‘What if I’m wrong?’” you wrote last week. So let me ask it. It wouldn’t be the first time. A year ago, for example, I explored the “test score hypothesis“—a line of reasoning, undergirding much of the reform movement, that says that if we can significantly improve low-income students’ math and reading skills, as measured by standardized tests, we can significantly increase their chances of escaping poverty.

Let’s unpack this hypothesis a bit.

As it stands now, children born into poverty come into kindergarten with massive deficits—in terms of vocabulary, content knowledge, and non-cognitive skills. And if they make it to high school graduation 13 years later (and many will not), they will leave, on average, reading and doing math at an 8th-grade level. Of the low-income teens that give higher education a shot, the vast majority of will end up in remedial education and then wash out. More than half of poor children will become poor adults, with poor children of their own. The cycle will repeat. Our hope is that by improving our schools (and, yes, other things too), we can change this narrative.

Let’s imagine that our schools can help the average child born into poverty do somewhat better. Let’s say that with a combination of talented and well-trained teachers, a rich and rigorous curriculum, lots of supports, and strong leadership, we’re able to get poor students, on average, to a 10th-grade level by the time they graduate high school. Suddenly they can attend a community college, or even a four-year university, without starting in remedial education. They are much more likely to graduate, at least with an associate’s degree or a technical credential. Rather than making minimum wage, they will make a living wage.

They are less likely to get pregnant as teens, or end up in prison, or drop out of the workforce. Their children wouldn’t be born poor—they would be born middle class. This would be transformative.

Notice the key assumption built into this “theory of action”: reading and math matter a lot. Getting to the 10th-grade level instead of the 8th-grade level (even as measured by rinky-dinky standardized tests) would make a meaningful difference in real lives. With that assumption in place, it’s not crazy—in fact, it’s perfectly rational—to hold schools accountable for helping their students make progress every year with their reading and math skills. It’s smart to put in place clear, high standards—let’s call them common-core standards—that will delineate the path from poverty to prosperity, that will help schools and teachers focus on the knowledge and skills that matter most, and will get students to true readiness for college and career by the age of 18.

So Deborah, are you ready for the big question, the kicker, the heart of the matter?

How sure are we that it’s literacy and numeracy, and related academic knowledge and skills, that are the most important precursors to success in college, career, and life? What if something else is just as important, or even more important, like “non-cognitive skills” or personal relationships? (Or perhaps the habit of “serious intellectual inquiry,” as you put it?)

And what if our “testing obsession” is crowding these other things out?

These are critical questions, but here’s what gives me solace.

First, the evidence is quite strong that reading and math achievement are critical tickets to the middle class. Look, for example, at the blockbuster study from Raj Chetty, John Friedman, and Jonah Rockoff that examined the impact of teachers on students’ long-term outcomes. AsKevin Carey explained at the time,

If you believe standardized tests are worthless or highly flawed or deeply inadequate or even troublingly limited in accuracy and scope-and many reasonable people believe these things-then you could dismiss or downplay value-added measures of teacher effectiveness, by definition. … But now the CFR study says that teachers who are unusually good at helping students score high on standardized tests today aren’t just unusually good at helping students score high on standardized tests tomorrow. They also have an unusual effect on the likelihood of students going to college, going to a good college, earning a good living, living in a nice place, and saving for retirement. In other words, whatever the limitations of standardized tests may be, test-based value-added scores do, in fact, provide valuable information about the things most people care most about.

Or look at the evidence that E.D. Hirsch cites about the impact of teenagers’ vocabulary on their long-term prospects, such as a 1999 study that shows that “a gain of one standard deviation on the Armed Forces Qualification Test raises one’s annual income by nearly $10,000 (in 2012 dollars).”

Or a brand-new study from the United Kingdom (flagged by Joanne Jacobs ) that finds that “math skills at 7 predict earnings at 42.”

Surely reading and math aren’t all that matters. Paul Tough makes a good case for non-cognitive skills. Others, yourself included, point to the importance of strong personal relationships with mentors. We could name more. But reading and math skills are at least necessary, if not sufficient.

On the other hand, there’s little evidence that the “testing obsession” is systematically getting in the way of good teaching and learning in high-poverty schools. That’s not because an obsession with testing isn’t a problem. It surely is, with its temptations of cheating, narrowing of the curriculum, and the culture of fear that it often perpetuates.

But here’s the rub, Deborah: Studies of high-poverty schools in America have demonstrated for decades that great teaching and learning have always been the exception, not the norm. To believe that testing is making these schools worse, you have to believe that they were once pretty good, or at least better than they are now. I just don’t see it. Do you? Where’s the evidence of that?

Furthermore, think back to Kevin Carey’s comments on the Chetty study. If an obsession with reading and math was crowding out more important tasks, why would students with stronger reading and math gains do better long-term than their peers?

Here’s what your readers need to remember: The choice today is not between 100,000 Central Park Easts or Mission Hills and 100,000 test-prep factories. If it were, I’d pick the Deborah Meier schools in a heartbeat. But let’s face it: There aren’t more than a handful of Deborah Meier schools out there. (The same goes with Don Hirsch schools or Mike Feinberg/Dave Levin schools, or any other brand you want to name.)

The typical high-poverty school is, and has always been, pretty mediocre. That’s not an indictment of the people who work in these schools; the problem is the system. And it’s not unique to education. Any big, bureaucratic government agency is going to struggle to achieve effectiveness, much less excellence. (Think the DMV.) Heck, even most large, private-sector companies are pretty lame, especially ones that don’t face much competition. (Think the electric company.) Layer on top of that all of the distracting demands placed upon schools, the fragmented nature of education governance, and, in some places at least, too few resources, and it would be a miracle if the typical high-poverty public school were good, much less great.

###

So do I think testing and accountability make matters worse? No. In fact, based on the studies cited above, I think they will make matters marginally better. I also think stronger standards and tests (a la common core) will make things better still.

What about you, Deborah? Are you willing to ask “What if I’m wrong?” What if it’s true that reading and math skills are hugely related to opportunities in life, and indeed are malleable? What if “direct instruction,” which you say isn’t needed, really is the most effective method for helping children in poverty develop those skills? What if it’s patently untrue that children learn “vocabulary, grammar, syntax, and spelling … the same way we learn everything else that matters,” as you stated last week, but instead have to be taught systematically? What if the perfect for which you have spent decades championing really is the enemy of the good—and the greater good, for millions of boys and girls throughout America?

Deborah, with all due respect, I ask you to ask yourself: Am I a part of the cure, or am I part of the disease?

-Michael Petrilli

This article originally appeared on the Bridging Differences blog, where Mike Petrilli will be debating Deborah Meier for the next month.

“The Department,” like any hulking, beltway-bound federal agency, can seem like a cold, faceless leviathan—this imposing force, issuing impenetrable regulations from a utilitarian, vaguely Soviet, city block–sized building in the shadow of the Capitol.

But those who interact with it regularly, especially those of us fortunate enough to have worked there, know that it is made up of hundreds and hundreds of very fine people.

During my tenure there, I found both the career staff and the political appointees to be knowledgeable public servants and excellent colleagues. While working for a state department of education, I found the Department’s team to be thoughtful, accessible, and accommodating. And in my loyal-opposition think-tank stints, during which I sometimes find myself poking and prodding the Department, they’ve been patient, respectful, but understandably steely adversaries.

I’m appreciative that they took the time to answer these questions so thoroughly, and I’m flabbergasted that they did so at—in terms of agency timelines—Guinness-Book speed.

What would the U.S. Department of Education (ED) like people to know about the testing consortia?

The consortia are designing the next generation of assessment systems, which include diagnostic or formative assessments, not just end-of-the-year summative assessments. Their systems will assess student achievement of standards, student growth, and whether students are on-track to being college and career ready. These new systems will offer significant improvements directly responsive to the wishes of teachers and other practitioners: they will offer better assessment of critical thinking, through writing and real-world problem solving, and offer more accurate and rapid scoring. The Smarter Balanced consortium’s assessment will also be “computer-adaptive,” meaning that the difficulty of questions will adjust to students’ ability levels as they proceed through the test.

The two consortia are making significant progress developing their assessment systems and are making an effort to be as transparent as possible, going well beyond what is typical in an assessment-development process. They have released a wide variety of information on how they will create the assessments and have invited comment from educators, district practitioners, additional national experts and the public. In addition, both PARCC and Smarter Balanced have released sample items to offer educators and the public an early look and will release additional questions this summer.

When the two consortia roll out their new assessments in the 2014-15 school year, they will be works in progress. We fully expect some schedule adjustments and technical glitches. Assessment 2.0 will need lots of work to get to version 2.1 and 2.2. States and districts will improve implementation as they learn from pilots and field tests. And teachers will play an absolutely critical role in providing the consortia feedback about what works and what doesn’t work.

How important are PARCC and Smarter Balanced to Common Core? Is the fate of the standards tied to the fate of the consortia?

This new generation of assessments—combined with the adoption of internationally benchmarked, college and career-ready standards—is an absolute game-changer for American education. PARCC and Smarter Balanced are tremendously important as a step forward to getting better, more accurate, and more actionable data about what students know and can do. As important as better assessments are, they must work in tandem with high-quality curriculum; meaningful, job-embedded professional development; and all the other pieces that will support educators preparing to teach to these new standards.

Most education observers know the consortia received federal funding several years ago. But the field probably knows less about ED’s interactions with the consortia since. That is, have they been on their own, or has ED been providing technical assistance and advice along the way?

As with all grantees, the Department works to ensure that the grants are on track, that funds are spent appropriately, and that we have actively supported grantee success. See the RTTA Program Review Process for some additional details. In addition, because we recognize the complexity of the consortia’s work, we have held a series of public meetings over the past two years to address particular components of their system—state and local technology needs, automated scoring of assessments, and how to improve the accessibility of assessments for all students, particularly students with disabilities and English learners. While each consortium has created its own technical advisory group, the Department recently created the RTTA Technical Review to help analyze each consortium’s progress and identify areas where additional attention may be necessary.

There have been recent signs of trouble. Alabama just abandoned the consortia (after Utah did so last year). Florida’s chief Tony Bennett said he’s looking for a “Plan B.” A March survey revealed that 65 percent and 70 percent of “education insiders” thought that PARCC and Smarter Balanced, respectively, were on the wrong track. What’s ED’s reaction to these events?

The states are the vital decision-makers here. States have demonstrated remarkable leadership, first through developing and adopting new, higher standards, and then through design and development of the next generation of high-quality assessments. But this is hard work. We are asking an enormous amount of principals and teachers in the next several years. We fully expect that there will be states that choose not to stay on board, and in those that do, we must provide teachers and principals with the resources and professional development they need to make the transition. Further, even if a state opts out of a consortium now, they can re-enter at any time in the future.

Does ED have a message to states contemplating exiting the consortia?

States must make the right decisions for their students and communities. There’s overwhelming agreement that high standards and well-aligned assessments, emphasizing critical thinking and writing, are vital to serving students well. How states get there is entirely up to them.

It’s worth pointing out that when the states developed the Common Core State Standards, they provided some important distinctions from current standards and current state tests. For example, the Common Core emphasizes writing in the English language arts standards. Any assessment aligned to the Common Core needs to similarly emphasize writing, which is a skill children need to be ready for college and the workforce. These and other distinctions mean that assessments that truly measure the Common Core will likely look different from current state tests, necessary as we move from fill-in-the-bubble tests toward more engaging assessments that better mirror good instruction in the classroom.

It seems that ED has leverage because of promises states made when applying for NCLB waivers and accepting stimulus and Race to the Top funding. Would the Department exercise the authority it has in an effort to hold the consortia together, or would the Department stand down and allow each state to make the decision it deems best?

The Department is focused on states developing college- and career-ready standards and aligned high-quality assessments that provide a better, more accurate measure of what students know and can do and whether they graduate high school ready for college or the workforce. We don’t want to see any state go backward. We expect the consortia to develop assessment systems that are markedly better than current assessments and we expect them to be already considering how to continue innovating and improving the systems. We understand that states may choose a different way of measuring whether its students are ready for college and careers and we are working with states such as Minnesota, Virginia, and Utah on their approaches. Again, states need to individually make the best decision for them based on all the relevant facts.

Do you trust that states opting out of the consortia will pick assessments possessing the characteristics the Department wanted to be part of assessments in the Common Core era—e.g., tightly aligning with the new standards, moving beyond “bubble tests,” accurately measuring performance at the ends of the performance distribution, and producing final results quickly?

We expect that all states will continue to improve their assessment systems. This currently includes requirements that state tests are aligned to the standards chosen by the state, provide accurate, valid, and reliable data about student knowledge and skills, and measures higher-order thinking skills. In December 2012 the Department paused our peer review of state assessment systems in order to reconsider whether our criteria and process for evaluating assessments is sufficient to measure whether an assessment system is a high-quality measure of college and career readiness. We will be providing additional detail in the coming months about our process and our criteria. Once complete, all assessment systems, including PARCC, Smarter Balanced, and all other state assessment systems, will be required to demonstrate how they meet the requirements for technical quality, alignment, and other assessment best practices. It is vital students, parents and educators receive reliable and valid information on student achievement of standards, student growth, and whether students are on-track to being college and career ready regardless of what state they reside in.

If states splinter, going their own ways on test and, presumably, cut scores, haven’t we lost much of the rationale for states’ adopting Common Core? Won’t we be left unable to conduct cross-state comparisons, and won’t states still be able to lower the proficiency bar to improve their scores?

Having multiple state assessment systems aligned to common content standards with different cut scores and proficiency standards would make comparison harder (though not impossible), which would be unfortunate. In addition, the public reporting and transparency required under ESEA would continue to be an avenue to identify schools and districts that are doing a good job and identify where states are lagging in what they expect of students. States that have college- and career-ready standards will continue to work with their institutions of higher education to identify what it means to measure college- and career-readiness on state tests. This is important work that PARCC and Smarter Balanced are actively engaged in and something that has been lacking in state assessment systems previously. For states not in either consortium in the future, the connection to higher education will help ensure that states set a rigorous bar for college and career readiness. In addition, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) will continue to give the nation a “report card” on how students are doing across states.

A reasonable person might ask, “If the private market seems to be producing assessments that meet states’ needs, why did ED spend well more than $300 million to develop tests?” Could you please explain ED’s thinking behind these investments?

In 2010, in direct response to requests from governors and chief state school officers, the Department elected to use a portion of the Race to the Top funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) to support the next generation of assessment because the market was not meeting their needs. Current state tests were missing several important opportunities—they often did not measure the full range of what students should know, focusing on easier skills and ignoring hard-to-measure standards, and most states did not include writing in their assessment systems (to name just a few of the issues with the current market of tests).

We have already seen the Race to the Top Assessment program move the field of assessment. Forty-four states and DC, working in two consortia to develop assessments aligned to the Common Core, have pushed the field to react in ways they likely would not have reacted if each state were separately pursuing a new set of assessments. A 2012 study by the RAND Corporation, for example, indicated that most state tests do not assess “deeper learning skills” of cognitively complex tasks. By contrast, an initial study of the consortia by CRESST in 2013 shows promising results for the consortia’s ability to measure students’ ability “mastering and being able to apply core academic content and cognitive strategies related to complex thinking, communication, and problem solving.”

In recent months, concerns about cheating have skyrocketed as a number of cities and states have been forced to address serious allegations. Is ED concerned about test security given that numerous states will be giving the same exams during different test windows?

Yes, the Department is concerned about test security. We don’t think the concerns are any greater with PARCC and Smarter Balanced than with current state tests; though the challenges may change slightly due to the tests being primarily computer-based and the fact that a breach in security could have repercussions beyond a single state. The consortia need to establish security controls and procedures to address these issues, and we expect them to do so as they ramp up toward the field test in spring 2014 and the first operational assessment in the 2014-2015 school year.

It’s worth pointing out that in recent months, critics have claimed that high-stakes tests drive teachers and school administrators to cheat. But that argument confuses correlation with causation. And it also ignores history. There is no excuse for school administrators and teachers tampering with student tests to boost test scores. It is morally indefensible—and it is most damaging to the very students who most desperately need the help of their teachers and school leaders.

We reject the idea that the system makes people cheat. Millions of educators administer tests but very few chose to cheat. In all but a tiny minority of cases, teachers want their children to genuinely learn and grow—not achieve phony gains to make themselves or their schools look good. In places where a district’s culture is rotten, people must speak out. But the vast, vast majority of educators are committed to assessing their students’ progress with complete integrity.

—Andy Smarick

This blog entry first appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Common Core Watch blog

For more, check out Andy Smarick’s interviews with PARCC and Smarter Balanced.

Let’s start with the claim from the editorial board of the Dunn County News in Wisconsin that “Private schools have the right – even under vouchers – to not accept a child, for whatever reason.”  This charge that voucher-accepting private schools can pick and choose which students they do and do not admit is as ubiquitous as it is consistently false.  First, all private schools in the country, whether in voucher programs or not, are prohibited from discriminating in admissions on the basis of race, color, or national origin (42 USC 1981).    Second, Wisconsin Statutes §§119.23(2)(a) and (a)1.a have consistently been interpreted to mean that private schools in the voucher program cannot discriminate against a student with a disability in admission to the school.  In fact, state law explicitly requires “that the private school determines which pupils to accept on a random basis” (§119.23(3)(a)).  A statistical analysis that my research team conducted during our five-year evaluation of the program confirmed that no measure of student disadvantage – not disability status, not test scores, not income, not race – was statistically associated with whether or not an 8^th grade voucher student was or was not admitted to a 9^th grade voucher-receiving private school.  Our evidence is consistent with the expectation that private schools are admitting voucher students at random during that critical transition, as the law requires, and not as the Dunn County editorial board claims.

What of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) order that the Wisconsin State Department of Public Instruction, which oversees the MPCP, take steps to ensure that the private schools in the program are complying with Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)?  Private organizations normally are exempt from Title II of ADA but the DOJ argues that the law applies to private schools in the MPCP because the government is contracting with them to provide a public service (the education of K-12 students).  This claim flies in the face of the facts and case-law surrounding the program.  The voucher program does not involve any contracts, of any kind, between any government organization and the participating private schools.  Students need to meet certain eligibility restrictions to participate in the program, as do interested private schools.  Once both are deemed eligible by the state, students choose schools and government funds flow to the private schools based on the choices families have made and consistent with the laws governing the program, not based on any “contract”.  In fact, the Wisconsin State Statute that governs the MPCP, §119.23, is entirely separate from Wisconsin State Statute §119.235 entitled “Contracts with Private Schools and Agencies”.  Nothing could make the point clearer that the MPCP is not a case of government contracting for education services.

In recognition of the reality that the MPCP is not a case of the government contracting, the Wisconsin State Supreme Court ruled twice (Davis v. Grover, 166 Wis.2d 501, 480 N.W.2d 460 (1992); Jackson v. Benson 213 Wis. 2d 1, 570 N.W.2d 407 (1998)) that students who use an MPCP voucher are “parentally placed” and not governmentally placed in their resulting private school.  The U.S. Supreme Court permitted both cases to stand as decided.  When parents place their children in private schools, as they have for hundreds of years, the courts have determined that such placements, even if supported by a government-issued voucher, neither violate the First Amendment (Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, 536 U.S. 639 (2002)) nor render the private schools subject to federal education disability law (34 CFR § 300.130).

Some of the actions that the DOJ is ordering the Wisconsin DPI to take could be viewed as inconsistent with both state law and the goal of non-discrimination in student admissions.  For example, the DOJ has ordered DPI to collect data regarding the “number of students with disabilities enrolled in voucher schools”.  The DPI-issued regulations governing the program currently prohibit private schools from requesting disability-related information on the student application form, both because DPI is not authorized by state law to request that information and to mitigate against the possibility that the private schools would use that disability information to discriminate in admissions.  Thus, DPI can either violate state law in requiring that private schools collect information that could be used to discriminate against students with disabilities or disobey a federal government order.  Tough choice.

The origin of this entire kerfuffle was a DPI press release on March 29, 2011, stating that the private schools in the MPCP “reported about 1.6 percent of choice students have a disability”.  When I asked DPI officials how they got that information, since state law does not authorize either the schools of DPI to ask MPCP students if they have a disability, they responded that they calculated the rate based on the percentage of MPCP students who were given accommodations on the state accountability exam.  It is well-known that only a minority of all students with disabilities are given testing accommodations, so the 1.6 percent rate is clearly both an invalid and unreliable measure of the true student disability rate in MPCP.  As researchers, and not government officials, we were able to collect more reliable information about the rates of student disability in the MPCP and calculate that it is 7.5 to 14.6 percent, with our best estimate being 11.4 percent.

Still, I think the most telling statistic regarding school choice and special education in the MPCP came from State Superintendent Tony Evers when he stated in his “Response to the U.S. DOJ Civil Rights Division Letter of August 17, 2011” that “DPI accepts due process complaints and state complaints related to the equitable services provisions of IDEA…, but has not received any such complaints related to the participation of children with disabilities in the MPCP.”  So, after 22 years of operation and with 25,000 student participants, approximately 11 percent of whom have disabilities, the state agency that oversees the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program has received a grand total of 0 complaints regarding the program’s treatment of students with disabilities.  Far less than a mountain, there isn’t even a molehill here.

-Patrick Wolf

But critics of school choice policies argue that these reforms will lead to increased segregation by race and class as more motivated families move to better schools, leaving the most disadvantaged students behind in the worst public schools. Criticism has often focused on charter schools given the growth in the charter sector in recent years. Nationwide, charter enrollment grew from 1 to 3 percent of all students between 1999-2000 and 2009-10. Charters make up a much larger share of the market in several places, including 11 percent of Arizona students and 37 percent in the District of Columbia.

Charter critics point to reports showing differences in the demographic characteristics of charter school students and their counterparts in traditional public schools as evidence that choice leads to segregation. For example, a 2010 report by UCLA’s Civil Rights Project found that black charter school students were twice as likely to attend schools that enrolled fewer than 10 percent non-minority students as their counterparts in traditional public schools. This type of analysis says little about segregation because it compares charter schools to all schools nationwide, when charter schools tend to be located in areas with large concentrations of minority students. A reanalysis of the data used in the UCLA report found much smaller differences between charter and traditional public schools once more appropriate comparisons were made between the two groups of schools.

But any comparison of the demographics of students in charter and traditional public schools provides at best an incomplete picture of segregation because segregation resulting from school choice policies would occur primarily across schools, not within schools.[1] The existence of charter schools could alter the composition of traditional public schools (by drawing students away from them), thereby compromising comparisons between the two sectors as a source of information about the effect of choice on segregation. However, a RAND study found that, in most states, students tend to transfer between traditional public and charter schools with similar racial compositions.

I provide new evidence on this question based on an analysis of nine years of data from the Common Core of Data, the federal government’s annual census of all public schools. For each of the more than 3,000 counties in the U.S., I calculate an “exposure index” that measures the share of non-minority students at the schools attended by the average under-represented minority student.[2] The average minority student in the U.S. attends a school that is 33 percent non-minority. In other words, the typical minority student attends a majority-minority school. Likewise, the typical student eligible for free or reduced-price lunch (a proxy for economic disadvantage) attends a school where almost two-thirds of students are also eligible for a subsidized lunch.

A naïve examination of the relationship between this measure of (de)segregation and the percentage of students enrolled in charter schools appears to show that the critics are right: more choice is associated with minority students attending less diverse schools. For the 2010-11 school year, a 10-percentage-point increase in charter enrollment is associated with a decline of 16 percentage points in minority students’ exposure to non-minority students. A similar but weaker relationship exists along class lines (as measured by free lunch eligibility).

Of course, this relationship ignores the fact that charters tend to locate in areas that serve large shares of disadvantaged students and members of minority groups. As a result, this simple correlation tells us nothing about whether charters increase segregation or just tend to locate in areas where the schools are already segregated. This is the same methodological flaw that compromised the findings of the UCLA study.

A better approach to the question of whether choice increases segregation is to look at changes over time. Did areas that saw large increases in choice experience larger increases in segregation than areas that saw smaller increases in choice? This kind of analysis does not conclusively measure the causal effect of choice on segregation, but by examining the same locales over time it represents a clear improvement over the cruder approach of comparing different locales at the same point in time. For example, it takes into account any unmeasured factors, such as the degree of residential segregation, to the extent that those factors remain constant over time.

Figure 1 shows the relationship between the change in charter enrollment and the change in minority exposure to non-minority students between 2002-03 and 2010-11.[3] The cloud of points suggests little relationship between these two factors, and a regression analysis confirms that this is the case.[4] There is actually a slight positive (and statistically significant) relationship between choice and diversity, but it is very weak and is not also found in the free-lunch data.

Figure 1. Change in Minority Exposure to Non-Minority Students vs. Change in Charter Enrollment, U.S. Counties, 2002-03 to 2010-11

Click to enlarge

I also used an alternative measure of segregation called a “dissimilarity index” and obtained similar findings: no consistent relationship between changes in charter enrollment and changes in segregation. Finally, I conducted a more sophisticated panel data analysis that uses all nine years of data to estimate the relationship between charter enrollment and segregation using only the changes within counties over time^.[5] Once again, using both the exposure and dissimilarity indices, the results consistently indicated no meaningful relationship between choice and segregation.

The lack of any consistent relationship between charter enrollment and segregation does not eliminate the possibility that such a relationship exists, but suggests that it is unlikely. For there to be a relationship, it would have to be the case that counties where charter enrollment increased experienced an increase in segregation as a result but then adopted policies (or experienced other changes) that counteracted the increase in segregation. In my view, that is not a very plausible explanation for these results.

There is no doubt that the high level of segregation in American society, including in our schools, is an important problem in its own right. The findings reported here indicate that it is unlikely that charter schools—a prominent effort to increase school choice, especially for students from disadvantaged backgrounds—are making the problem worse. But school choice policies come in a variety of flavors which may have different effects on the demographic makeup of schools. There may be examples of poorly designed choice programs that have increased segregation. For example, a choice system that is complicated and difficult to navigate may advantage affluent, educated parents at the expense of other parents.

Conversely, perhaps carefully designed choice policies can play a role in lessening the segregation of schools by race and class. For example, a simple, streamlined process that allows families to choose any school in a large urban district—and uses a fair method for allocating spaces at oversubscribed schools—could be a way to weaken the link between residential and school segregation that has plagued our school system since the end of legally mandated segregation more than 50 years ago.

-Matthew Chingos

This blog entry first appeared on the Brown Center Chalkboard from the Brookings Institution.

After my ominous prediction about the consortia’s fates, Smarter Balanced quickly responded in private. Their counter was both courteous and forceful. I was impressed by the initial case they made, and I’m very glad that they swiftly agreed to participate in this public Q&A.

Could you please briefly describe the process (including the challenges) of creating “next-generation” assessments aligned with new standards via a multi-state consortium?

The process Smarter Balanced is using is very similar to the processes that states have been using for over a decade to create assessments for NCLB accountability. Using a widely regarded conceptual approach called Evidence-Centered Design, and working in partnership with an array of private sector companies, work groups comprising assessment leadership from Smarter Balanced states have developed the various components necessary for a next-generation assessment system. Among the major elements are:

• IT architecture and open-source software to deliver, score and report on assessments
• Content and item specifications and a test blueprint to govern the content and format of the assessment
• Accommodations and accessibility features and policies
• Achievement-level descriptors, college content-readiness policy and plans for standard-setting
• Reporting system design
• Validity testing and psychometric research

This work has benefited immensely from the pooled expertise of state assessment professionals; K12 teachers, higher education faculty and other academic content experts; and staff from a diverse array of private sector firms. While the process that is being used to develop the Smarter Balanced assessment system would be familiar to anyone who has ever built a test, what is unique about Smarter Balanced is the bringing together of a large and diverse array of talent committed to making each element of the system “best in breed.”

What is Smarter Balanced most proud of?

We are proud that we have simultaneously been able to meet three ambitious goals:

1. We have hit all the major project milestones for delivering all three aspects of the assessment system—summative, interim and formative—on-time and on-budget for the 2014-15 academic year.

2. We have done this through a state-led process featuring consensus-based decision-making and the hard work of dedicated K-12 and higher education educators and administrators.

3. We have met our milestones without sacrificing our very high quality standards, and we continue to push the envelope of innovation in test design, including ground-breaking open-source software, innovative items and performance tasks, and new approaches to key processes such as developing achievement level descriptors and standard-setting.

What elements of this project proved more difficult than you expected?

Building an assessment system as large, multi-faceted, and sophisticated as the Smarter Balanced system is challenging, but the test-development process Smarter Balanced is using follows a sequence of steps that is familiar to all experienced assessment professionals. Given the extensive expertise of the Smarter Balanced state leadership and staff, the difficulties we have encountered in test development have not been unforeseen or unmanageable. The greater challenge is responding to the intense—and legitimate—interest of so many diverse parties in this work. State assessment directors expect scrutiny by policy makers, parents, interest groups, and others, but the number and diversity of the interested parties is much greater when working on the scale of a multi-state consortium. Keeping this diverse array of interested parties informed about the complex and often highly technical work of building an assessment system has been more challenging than we originally imagined.

Do states have the devices and bandwidth needed to deliver your online, adaptive assessments?

Some states are ready and are currently assessing students online. Other states are in the process of preparing for the assessments and will be ready when the assessments become operational in 2014-15. Recognizing the need for a transition period, for three years Smarter Balanced will support the use of a paper-and-pencil option for those schools not fully ready right away. Further, the minimum technology specifications that Smarter Balanced released last fall allow for very old operating systems and require only the minimum processors and memory required to run the operating system itself (for example, the summative assessment can be delivered using computers with 233 MHz processors and 128 MB RAM that run Windows XP). Likewise, the file size for individual assessment items will be very small to minimize the network bandwidth necessary to deliver the assessment online. Right now, Smarter Balanced provides a bandwidth checker to allow schools to determine the number of students that can simultaneously take tests and is hosting, in collaboration with PARCC, a “technology readiness tool” that allows schools and districts to assess and track their progress toward readiness.

Smarter Balanced has deployed small-scale trials and a pilot test to incrementally improve its technology system; these efforts have also helped districts better understand the technology and human resource requirements necessary to deploy the online assessments. The Smarter Balanced practice test to be released at the end of May and the Smarter Balanced field tests to be deployed in Spring 2014 will provide additional opportunities for schools to gain experience in deploying the assessments.

In recent months, concerns about cheating have skyrocketed. How can you guarantee test security given that numerous states will be giving the same exams during different test windows?

Actually, under the Smarter Balanced summative assessment design, states will be giving different tests during the same 12-week window at the end of each academic year. In a computer-adaptive assessment, each student’s test is customized based on his/her performance throughout the test. There will be no way for students to copy each other’s answers since each will be looking at a unique question. Further, since the results are captured electronically, it will not be possible for adults to tamper with results once the test administration is completed.

For schools using the paper-and-pencil option, the particular form students receive will depend on their responses to a short “locater test.” Since scoring standards will differ for the various forms, there will be no incentive for teachers to steer students to the less challenging forms.

Beyond elements of the test design that will militate against the risk of cheating, the Smarter Balanced test administration policies will call on states to conform to best practices with regard to independent monitoring and proctoring.

A defining moment on the horizon is when Smarter Balanced attempts to set cut scores and have all member states sign on. Can you help us understand the process you’ll use to reach consensus? How important is it that the cut scores are high and that members agree?

It is essential that the scores accurately reflect student mastery of the Common Core State Standards and that they have a common meaning across Smarter Balanced states. Our member chief state school officers, who will ultimately vote on the cut scores, view rigorous common performance standards as an essential element of realizing the promise of the Common Core State Standards. From its beginning, Smarter Balanced has relied upon a consensus-based process for all its policy decisions. Our experience has been that our states have little difficulty in reaching consensus when we are deliberative and remain open and transparent as policy decisions develop. We don’t expect the standard setting process to be any different.

That said, we acknowledge the challenge in setting performance standards at the scale of a multi-state consortium. Relying entirely on the traditional workshop format typically used for standard setting would make it difficult for each state to feel adequately represented in the process. To address this challenge, we are planning an innovative approach to standard-setting that will take advantage of our online testing platform to allow the participation of as many constituents as interested to review exemplar test items and weigh in on where they think the “cut scores” should be set. This crowd-sourced data, parsed by state and by respondent role (teachers, higher education faculty, parents, etc.) can then inform the comparatively small number of individuals participating in the standard-setting workshop.

How important are the two testing consortia to Common Core? Is the fate of the standards tied to the fate of the consortia?

The Common Core will succeed or fail in the classroom. Effective instruction is at the heart of meeting the high expectations set by the standards. Smarter Balanced is grounded in the notion that putting good information about student performance in the hands of teachers can have a profound impact on instruction and—as a result—on student learning. By accurately assessing the deeper learning required by the standards, and by helping teachers sharpen their own skills in formative, classroom-based assessment through the Digital Library of Formative Tools and Practices, Smarter Balanced can make a positive contribution to the ultimate success of the Common Core.

Are you confident that Smarter Balanced will be able to deliver online, adaptive assessments on time, on budget, and in all promised grades/subjects to all member states in 2014–15?

We are on track to deliver each aspect of our assessment system on time and on budget in 2014-15. To date, our work has been supported through contracts with every one of the country’s large testing companies. We have successfully sought bids and procured multiple contracts consistent with our overall project plan, and we continue to be on schedule. This spring we are pilot testing the first 5,000 items and tasks we have developed with about a million students, engaging more than 5,200 schools drawn from all 21 of our governing states. The pilot test also serves as a beta test for our test delivery software. In addition to testing out our items, performance tasks, and software, the pilot test also gives us an opportunity to evaluate a variety of accessibility features for students with disabilities and English language learners.

How concerned are you by Alabama’s and Utah’s decisions to abandon the testing consortia and Florida chief Tony Bennett’s public statement that he’s looking for a “Plan B?” Are we about to see a mass exodus from the consortia?

We regret that Alabama and Utah chose to leave the consortium; each state did so for particular reasons unrelated to the progress of the Consortium or to design decisions that the member states had reached. While those states have chosen to leave the Consortium, Alaska and the U.S. Virgin Islands have recently joined Smarter Balanced, and many states that initially joined as advisory states have transitioned to governing status, reflecting their commitment to the Consortium.

About how many states do you expect to administer Smart Balanced assessments in all covered grades and subjects in 2014–15? How many states will be participating in Smarter Balanced and PARCC combined?

We have no reason to expect changes among our 21 governing states. Recently, our governing states completed a survey asking them to identify the Smarter Balanced assessments they are most likely to ultimately use. All but one state indicated plans to use the full suite of formative, interim, and summative assessments. The one remaining state plans to implement only the summative assessment.

We also currently have four advisory states; some of those states may choose to select different assessments while others may transition to governing status.

If a state chief called you tomorrow and said, “A trusted vendor is guaranteeing me high-quality, secure assessments below Smarter Balanced costs and without all of the hassles that come along with a 20-state consortium,” what would you tell him/her?

A primary benefit of the Smarter Balanced assessment system is that it is built by states, for states. States in the Consortium have a level of direct decision-making control that they could never hope to achieve with an “off-the-shelf” product. They also are assured of a level of multi-states comparability, both within the Consortium and across PARCC and Smarter Balanced, which is unlikely to be reached with a commercial test. Finally, the transparency of the Smarter Balanced system is antithetical to the competitive nature of commercial test publishing. Examples of that transparency include:

• Our open-source test delivery software
• Our open bank of interim items that are built to the same specifications as the item bank for the secure summative assessment
• The extent to which the documents that guide our work invite public review and are published online
• The full and open disclosure of our plans for research and validity and the results of those studies.

Additionally, Smarter Balanced is developing a distributed, multi-actor system of test delivery, with the Consortium maintaining responsibility only for those aspects that are essential for ensuring continued comparability of results, quality improvements, and state-led governance. Under this system, many of the services that states need to administer the tests and deliver results will come from the vendor community. This system allows states to maintain control over content and quality while outsourcing to the private sector those elements of test delivery system that these companies have mastered.

Finally, the estimated total cost for the Smarter Balanced assessments ($22.50 per student for the summative assessment in both English language arts and math, or $27.30 per student for the full system of formative, interim and summative assessments) is less than the amount that about two-thirds of our member states currently pay for their state assessments. These costs encompass both the services provided by Smarter Balanced in common to all member states and the services that states will either provide directly or procure from vendors in the private sector.

One element dominates the cost: approximately 70 percent of the vendor cost for summative assessments is tied to hand-scoring. Measuring the deeper learning required by the Common Core requires that students write extensively and much of that writing cannot yet be scored by technology. Paying teachers, faculty, and other content experts to score student responses is costly, but it is currently the only effective way to measure important elements of the Common Core. Until automated scoring of writing improves, reducing the cost would require reducing the amount of writing—a step that cannot be taken without compromising fidelity to the standards. Smarter Balanced can include extensive writing and maintain a reasonable cost because our size allows us to take advantage of economies of scale. Off-the-shelf tests that cost substantially less than Smarter Balanced assessments almost certainly will not include as many items and tasks that require students to produce a response rather than simply find a correct answer. We believe this is a significant quality benefit of Smarter Balanced.

Could you please describe Smarter Balanced’s relationship with the U.S. Department of Education? For example, how often do you meet with them, what kinds of technical assistance do they provide, how much do they direct your work, etc.?

Smarter Balanced is funded under a cooperative agreement with the U.S. Department of Education that extends through September 2014. The fiscal agent for the federal grant is the state of Washington. The Department of Education has responsibility for fiduciary and programmatic oversight of the grant. In essence, they need to track that we are doing the things we promised to do and spending funds in accordance with our approved budget. Like any federal grantee, Smarter Balanced must operate within the requirements of its federal grant; however, there is a great deal of latitude built into the grant for state decision-making. For example, the grant stipulates that Smarter Balanced must build an assessment of the Common Core State Standards, but the test blueprint specifying the proportion of test material on various topics is something the states in the Consortium decide.

We meet with program officers at the Department monthly and provide them with quarterly financial and programmatic reports. In addition, once a year we undergo a thorough program review, not unlike the program review that states have always gone through for their Title I grants.

Since the inception of No Child Left Behind, the Department of Education has used a process called “Peer Review” to ensure that all state testing programs adhere to the AERA/NCME/APA Joint Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing. The consortia assessments will be no different with regard to this Peer Review, and we have already been preparing and submitting materials to the Department of Education for that purpose. This level of review is no greater nor less than the technical scrutiny the Department of Education requires of all state tests designed to meet the requirements of federal accountability.

At the conclusion of the federal grant, Smarter Balanced will transition to being an operational assessment system supported by its member states. The consortium does not plan to seek additional funds from the U.S. Department of Education.

Why do you think 70 percent of “education insiders” say Smarter Balanced is on the wrong track?

Smarter Balanced was created by assessment professionals in state education agencies who determined that by pooling their experience and expertise—and by taking advantage of the federal funds offered by the Department of Education and working in partnership with private sector firms—they could build more sophisticated and accurate assessments of student learning than any individual state could offer on its own. For the last two and a half years, this group of technical experts has been busily doing its work, and the result is that Smarter Balanced is on track and on budget.

Assessment experts around the country have expressed nothing but admiration for the work that Smarter Balanced has done (for example, see http://www.cse.ucla.edu/products/reports/R823.pdf). The education insiders who responded to the survey referenced in this question likely aren’t experts in assessment and—because Smarter Balanced is not a Washington, DC-based organization and its leaders are not well known “inside the beltway”—they are not as familiar with the work the Consortium has done. Smarter Balanced is committed to doing more outreach and communication work to better inform all our stakeholders about the progress we have made and the challenges ahead.

Would you please explain your plans for Smarter Balanced’s future governance, leadership, and funding?

In March 2013, the governing states of Smarter Balanced endorsed a sustainability plan that included instructions for the Smarter Balanced executive director to enter into negotiations with the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing (CRESST) at UCLA to serve as a partner and host for the Smarter Balanced Consortium after the completion of the federal grant in September 2014. These negotiations are moving toward an agreement by UCLA to recognize the shared state ownership of the assessment system content and an independent governance structure much like the one that the consortium currently employs. Smarter Balanced will continue to be governed by its member states, with K-12 and higher education representatives and a small executive committee providing day-to-day oversight. Operations will be managed by a small staff under the leadership of an executive director and two deputies. Funding will come primarily from fees paid by states for packages of assessment services, with UCLA/CRESST providing office space and key administrative support in areas such as finance, human resources, legal advice, etc.

What else would you like people to know about Smarter Balanced?

As part of our commitment to transparency—and in order to help teachers, teacher educators, and other interested parties learn about and prepare for the assessments—Smarter Balanced will be releasing a complete set of practice tests for each subject and grade level at the end of May. These practice tests will be freely available on the Smarter Balanced web site (www.SmarterBalanced.org); they will utilize the same software system that is being used for the operational test and will feature many of the tools, accommodations and accessibility features that will be included in the final software package. Everyone interested in seeing first-hand what the assessments will look like is encouraged to visit our web site and challenge themselves by answering the questions in these practice tests.

-Andy Smarick

This blog entry first appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Common Core Watch blog.

Today, the What Works Clearinghouse declared the study to be “a well-implemented randomized controlled trial.”  We are grateful for that endorsement, because it should put an end to a line of criticism that has managed to obtain coverage in some portions of the electronic media.

Specifically, a review of our report from the National Education Policy Center purported to raise methodological concerns with our study.  We found their criticisms wanting and responded to them accordingly, but it is in the nature of methodological discussions that a specialized background is generally required in order to assess them.  As a result, even when there clearly is a correct answer in such debates, it will often appear to a journalist or another lay reader to be a “he said, she said” exchange.

This is exactly why the Institute of Education sciences, the research arm of the U.S. Department of Education, created the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC): “to be a central and trusted source of scientific evidence for what works in education.”  The WWC does its best to review studies objectively and to rate the quality of the methodology used, thereby helping policymakers and practitioners sort through the mounds of education research produced in the U.S., much of which is of low quality.

In the full review released today, the WWC found that our report on the effect of school vouchers on college enrollment “meets WWC evidence standards without reservations,” its highest possible rating.

Of course, policy should not turn on the results of any single study, as issues are complex and outcomes can vary over time and place. But policy should be informed by a body of high-quality research, and the U.S. is fortunate to have the WWC as an independent arbiter of quality.

-Matthew Chingos and Paul Peterson

Experts predict the housing market to heat up this summer. But house shopping can be frustrating for parents, who sometimes feel limited in their selection because of the spotty quality of public schools. Houses nearby top quality public schools generally command a premium.

The good news is that parents have new options for patching together a truly superior education plan for their kids, regardless of neighborhood. These ideas require legwork, but they are all becoming affordable possibilities for K-12 students. Here are four suggestions—two that work within the public school system and two outside the system:

First, mix advanced online courses into your child’s schedule. Most states either require districts to allow students to take online courses, or they let districts decide for themselves. To find your state’s policy, click on Digital Learning Now!, select a state, and then click “View State Profile.” That will link you to an overview of how friendly any given state is to online courses. Then check out Keeping Pace, which names specific programs within each state. Furthermore, roughly 20 states have a central website that lists approved courses, such as these: ACCESS (Alabama),  MoVIP (Missouri), IDEAL-NM (New Mexico), NCVPS (North Carolina), TXVSN (Texas), and Wyoming Switchboard Network (Wyoming).

Utah has a particularly helpful policy for parents. It lets districts authorize course providers, which means that parents can work within their districts to get the best courses approved. Many students there are starting to mix a few advanced online courses into their schedules to replace courses that are unavailable or mediocre in the neighborhood school.

Even elementary school children can benefit from targeted online opportunities in places where such opportunities are otherwise missing. Many in the younger set are blending online foreign language, music, or tutoring into their extracurricular (and in some cases, core) activities.

Second, ask your classroom teacher to let your child “prove it or lose it.” A young teen was falling behind in her math class, not to mention starting to despise math. Her father worked out a deal with the teacher whereby the teacher gave the student a calendar with dates for all the unit tests. The student was free to learn the material however she wanted, provided that she still attended class and passed the unit tests when the teacher administered them in class. But she could sit on the side of the classroom and work on her own, and she did not have to complete homework assignments. If she didn’t prove her progress with each unit test, the deal was off.

Excited about her windfall of control, the girl chose an entertaining math software program, for which her father gladly paid, and worked in the corner of the classroom and at night to prepare for each unit test. Her math results, as well as interest in math, soared.

This approach seems like a reasonable compromise. It allows students to find their own learning path, but still complies with standards, testing, attendance requirements, and so forth. If your child is ahead, the prove it/lose it method could also work to allow him or her to continue to advance independently without placing almost any extra work on the classroom teacher.

Third, set up a half-the-work (for you), twice-the-learning (for your child) homeschool. I am homeschooling one of my children for a few months until first grade. Each week I help her set learning goals and then let her choose how to achieve them. Most weekdays she free reads for up to an hour, writes a letter to her pen pal, completes 20 minutes of Dreambox math, and does Piano Marvel. It’s half the work of homeschooling for me, because I rely on the Internet for the backbone of her academics.

Meanwhile, she’s doing 10 hours per week of gymnastics training at the local gymnasium. She is passionate about gymnastics, and the 10 hours is much more than she would have time for if she were still in full-day kindergarten. It’s enough to allow gymnastics to be an area of excellence for her.

As online learning options expand and improve, I suspect more students will find they can master their core learning faster and then devote more time to apprenticeships and areas of excellence.

Fourth, keep your eye out for a micro-school (or start your own!). In theory, online learning will one day dramatically reduce the costs of obtaining an advanced education. As devices, communications tools, online tutorials, and learning science improve, entrepreneurs will find that online learning snaps easily into a brick-and-mortar shell, and we will see the proliferation of very affordable private schools. mSchool, an organization that helps community centers open one-classroom “microSchools,” is one early example. I imagine in the future we’ll see countless parent co-ops start to couple online learning with brick-and-mortar experiences to create a host of independent, blended-learning micro-schools.

Those are a few suggestions for radically enhancing your child’s learning possibilities without paying for a moving truck. For more background, watch Governor Jeb Bush give a national perspective on the rise of learning options in this video. Also, keep your eye out this month for a new Innosight Institute research paper about blended learning, which I have been lucky enough to co-author with Clayton M. Christensen and Michael B. Horn. In it we state that “as the online-learning ecosystem matures and political barriers become untenable, a noisy reshuffling will take place as students who before lived in the wrong zip code find that access to learning opportunities is no longer neighborhood defined.” I’m glad that’s becoming true!

-Heather Clayton Staker

Heather Clayton Staker is a senior research fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation.

This blog entry first appeared on the website of the Christensen Institute.

We’re launching with a three-day conversation with the primary players in the nation’s progression toward new, common assessments. Tomorrow, we’ll hear from Smarter Balanced, and Wednesday’s anchor leg will be run by the United States Department of Education.

But today, we have PARCC, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Career, one of two consortia of states funded by the federal government to develop “next-generation” assessments aligned with the Common Core State Standards.

Its governing board is comprised of some of the nation’s most prominent state chiefs, and it is supported by Achieve, a national nonprofit known for its “college- and career-ready agenda.” While working for the New Jersey Department of Education, a PARCC member, I got to know and admire its leadership and staff. Those relationships and my participation in various PARCC meetings and activities contributed greatly to my appreciation for the enormous complexity of assessment and the critical role of the testing consortia.

So with no further ado: PARCC.

Could you describe the process (including the many challenges) of creating “next-generation” assessments aligned with new standards via a multi-state consortium?

It is a rigorous process that requires 22 states to work together every day to drive towards consensus about a range of policies and assessment practices that support a positive and strong learning environment for every student. States have made an incredible commitment to this work.

There are thousands of state leaders, local educators and postsecondary leaders, administrators and faculty who are engaged in developing the PARCC assessment system. We are also seeking public input on many of our policies, often receiving thousands of individual comments.

Keeping the project on track requires intense daily focus by the entire PARCC team, especially the lead representatives from our states and local school systems. Hundreds of test-item writers and reviewers composed of SEA staff, teachers, higher education leaders and faculty, and education experts have spent countless hours developing and refining thousands of questions and items across all grade levels.

What is PARCC most proud of?

Below are the milestones that make us most proud:

• The states have full ownership of the development of the test, the quality of the items, the length of the test, the uses and usefulness of the output, etc.

• Developing Educator Leader Cadres — comprised of individual teachers and principals who are helping prepare for the Common Core and new assessments — now have more than 600 members across the states, and are getting bigger each day.

• At every step in the process, states demand a test that is developed with fidelity to the CCSS.

• Spurring collaboration between states that are geographically and politically diverse — from Arizona to New Jersey — is an unprecedented development in American public education.

• Colleges and universities are working overtime alongside their K-12 counterparts to develop assessments that will actually signal college readiness to students, parents and teachers.

• And, that through the consortium, states are able to ensure a higher quality assessment than any individual state could by itself. The power of states working together is going to move and improve the entire testing industry.

What elements of this project proved more difficult than you expected?

Political transitions sometimes result in staffing changes, and that can affect procurement timelines and processes. The good news is: Despite the transitions, the states’ commitment to PARCC remains strong. We are working hard with PARCC states to ensure procurement challenges don’t impede the work and the states’ commitment to PARCC remains strong despite the transitions.

Do states have the devices and bandwidth to deliver your on-line assessments?

States and local school systems are in various states of technology readiness. Some already are conducting online assessments and will be able to easily make the switch to PARCC when the time comes. Others still are making the necessary investments in infrastructure and devices over the next year or so, and many see PARCC as the vehicle to help make the upgrades they’ve wanted all along in order to improve classroom instruction. For school systems that can’t get there in time, we’ll have a backup pencil-and-paper option available.

The reality is for many K-12 students, inside the schoolhouse may be the place where technology is lacking most in their life. Kids play with their parents’ smartphones, play video games, and have computers and tablets at home. If PARCC can be a catalyst for improving student access to new technology, then we are glad to play that role.

How important are the two testing consortia to Common Core? Is the fate of the standards tied to the fate of the consortia?

The strength of the Common Core is found in the standards themselves. The coalition of teachers, higher education, the business community, Republicans, Democrats and others will determine the fate of the standards.

The importance of the consortia is found in their power to move the testing industry and to get comparable data on student achievement across states lines.

The new standards and the new tests obviously are part and parcel of a comprehensive new education system. The survival of one is not contingent on the other, but both parts taken together have the potential to dramatically improve teaching and learning in our states and local school systems. If states drop out of the consortia (for any reason, really), the power of the consortia is also diminished – and states will likely use lower quality tests to assess the CCSS, which undermines the promise of the new standards.

The CCSS without a high quality test is only aspirational. The test makes it actionable.

How confident are you that PARCC will be prepared to deliver online assessments on-time, on-budget, and in all promised grades and subjects to all member states during the 2014–15 school year?

Very confident! PARCC is on-track to deliver high quality computer-based summative assessments for mathematics and ELA/literacy in grades 3-11 in the 2014-15 school year.

About how many states do you expect to administer PARCC assessments in all covered grades and subjects in 2014–15? How many states will be participating in Smarter Balanced and PARCC combined?

PARCC has a total of 19 governing states and three participating states. Smarter Balanced has a similar number of states. Both consortia acknowledge that the numbers are subject to change. Over the past three years, for example, some states have left each consortium and others have joined. In PARCC, our governing states tell us they are in it for the long haul. But we know there are no guarantees. That is why we are working hard to produce the highest-quality assessment that reflects the needs of PARCC states. Maintaining the confidence of our states, and the educators and local school systems that are informing our work, is critical.

If a state chief called you tomorrow and said, “A trusted vendor is guaranteeing me high-quality, secure assessments below PARCC costs and without all of the hassles that comes along with a 20-state consortium,” what would you tell him/her?

The state chiefs have been hearing this sales pitch for years, and they are wise to the ways of the traditional testing industry. In the past, most states just developed specs and handed them off to the vendors and hoped for the best. The consortia assessments are our best chance to move the testing industry towards innovation and quality, to have comparable results across states at all grades, and to have a state-driven product that reflects state interests—not necessarily market interests.

The chiefs who have been a part of PARCC know all these benefits because they’re witnessing how PARCC is being developed. No vendor or individual state can deliver the kind of state-based quality review of items and oversight of vendors the consortium is doing right now. In addition, the value of “strength in numbers” vis-à-vis taking on new rigorous assessments and related policies cannot be underestimated.

Could you please describe your relationship with the U.S. Department of Education since your 2010 formation? For example, how often do you meet, what kinds of technical assistance do they provide, how much do they direct your work, etc.?

First, the states in the consortium created the PARCC proposal and they own the work. As with any grantor/grantee contract, USED monitors our work, but does not interject itself unless the grant terms are not being met. We participate in regular progress check-in calls and meetings, and USED provides technical assistance as needed or when states request it. For example, early in the grant cycle, USED convened technology experts to review both consortia’s development. Similarly, USED hosted a meeting to help inform the consortia’s approach to students with disabilities. Generally speaking, USED’s role is simply to ensure that we are satisfying the commitments we made in the grant proposal. Ultimately, the states have full ownership of this process and the final product that emerges.

Why do you think 65 percent of “education insiders” now say that PARCC is on the wrong track with that number having grown consistently over the last year?

The “education insiders” who matter most are our state chiefs, local educators and local school systems. They tell us they are pleased with our progress, and we will keep pushing forward as planned.

How concerned are you by Alabama’s decision to abandon the testing consortia and Florida chief Tony Bennett’s public statement that he’s looking for a “Plan B?”

Every state needs to make its own decisions. We respect Alabama’s position. But the consortium remains strong.

Our member states’ first choice is a state-developed test like PARCC. Commissioner Bennett in Florida is simply being a responsible chief who is planning for every possible eventuality. Our job is to make sure that PARCC remains “Plan A” for Florida and every other member state. We are on track to deliver the assessment on time, and look forward to working with our member states to implement it.

Would you please explain your plans for PARCC’s future governance, leadership, and funding?

PARCC recently filed paperwork that will move the consortium from being a “project” of the states to being an independent, nonprofit organization still led by the states. This shift will be completed before the end of the grant period in 2014-15. The chiefs who comprise the PARCC Governing Board continue to have decision-making authority for all of the consortium’s policy, operational and strategic decisions.

The Governing Board has some decisions to make on how we will go forward after the grant. Many options are being weighed. We expect more answers in 120 days.

What else would you like people to know about PARCC?

This is a state-driven effort, and, through PARCC, K-12 and postsecondary have come together as never before to ensure students have the opportunity to get ready for and succeed in college and the workforce. PARCC states are REALLY driving the vendors in a way that most states have never done with tests.

Our chiefs, key leaders in the state departments of education and local school systems, postsecondary institutions, and individual educators have made an unprecedented commitment to this work. They see this effort as the best opportunity in history to develop a high-quality assessment system that helps move the needle on student achievement and supports high-quality classroom instruction.

PARCC has been a rallying point for K-12 and higher education to come together as never before to ensure that students are ready for a career, college, and life. From the beginning, state leadership and quality have been the hallmarks of PARCC’s work. Those will continue to be our navigation points, moving forward.

—Andy Smarick

This blog entry first appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Common Core Watch blog

Behind the Headline
Private Schools for the Poor
Education Next |Fall 2005

In poor countries in Africa and South Asia, private schools exist for families of all social classes. As Tina Rosenberg explains on the Opinionator, two new school systems in Kenya and Bangladesh are now making decent education available to the poor on a large scale. James Tooley wrote about private schools for the poor around the world in the Fall 2005 issue of Education Next.

-Education Next

Dear Deborah,

Thanks for inviting me to join you on your blog. Even though we disagree on many issues, I have great respect for you and the work you’ve done in your career.

As I write this, I’m returning from the Education Writers Association annual conference, held this year at Stanford. I spoke on a panel about the “opportunity gap” with professors Sean Reardon and Prudence Carter. Reardon, as you know, recently published a fascinating but sobering study about the growing income achievement gap. (ASCD’s Educational Leadership has an accessible version of the study available online.) And Carter co-edited the new volume, Closing the Opportunity Gap.

What Professor Reardon’s research shows is that, over the last 60 years, the achievement gap between the nation’s poorest and richest students has widened dramatically. That’s true of both test scores and college attainment.

This finding is not surprising for people who have been paying attention, but what is surprising is where the gap lies. It’s not that poor children are falling behind the middle class—they’re not. It’s that the richest students are breaking away from everybody else.

Why is this happening? Here Reardon has to speculate. He considers whether it’s simply the result of America’s growing income inequality, and concludes that yes, that’s part of the story. Rich parents have more time and money to put into their children’s cognitive development because, well, they’re rich. But that doesn’t come close to a full explanation.

He offers a thesis that rich parents are behaving differently today—differently than they used to, and differently than middle-class and low-income parents. Rich parents are obsessed with their children’s social and intellectual development. They are spending dramatically more time parenting. And they are getting and staying married. (Forty percent of U.S. children today are born to single mothers; almost none of the richest children are.)

The first question, Deborah, is whether this behavior of the most affluent parents is even a “problem.” I would argue that rich parents are acting virtuously. I don’t think we want to tell them, “Stop spending so much time with your kids! Stop spending so much money on their cognitive development! Stop providing them the unfair advantage of two engaged parents!”

Still, their behavior creates a conundrum, because it almost certainly will make our society even more inequitable, as their children get a lot more education than everybody else’s and, thus, the best jobs and the related rewards. As Megan McCardle put it, “all the people who are really good at school are marrying the other people who are really good at school, having children who are really, really good at school.” And now that “returns to education” are larger than ever, that means they’re producing children who are really, really likely to be rich themselves.

The alternative approach is to help low-income and middle-class kids catch up. Carter’s book offers some ideas worth trying, especially high-quality preschool for kids in urgent need of it—which, by the way, would be more doable if we stopped spreading the money so thin.

Still, the message that comes through in Professors Reardon’s and Carter’s work—and from others on the left, including Diane Ravitch and Richard Rothstein—is that there’s not much schools can do about these gaps. They are visible before kids even enter kindergarten; they don’t grow much, if at all, while children are in the K-12 system; and they are fundamentally related to our country’s economic and political system. We’ll never make much progress until we get serious about redistributing income, or reviving labor unions, or raising the minimum wage, etc.

And that’s where I disagree. We need to stop having these extreme arguments, between “No excuses!” on one side and “It’s all about poverty!” on the other. Poverty matters immensely. Schools matter immensely. Let’s get on with addressing both.

So Deborah, what could schools be doing that they aren’t already trying? Let me offer one idea. (In the coming month, I’ll suggest others.) It’s simple: Schools could help young children build their vocabularies.

Now, that doesn’t sound so controversial. Who would be against that? And indeed, the early-childhood world is increasingly interested in the topic of vocabulary development, in part because of studies showing that poor students enter kindergarten with an enormous vocabulary deficit. Cities are launching new efforts to teach low-income parents to speak to their babies and toddlers more (and more effectively) in an effort to close this deficit.

But what can preschools and elementary schools do to build vocabulary? It’s not sitting down with kids and making them memorize flash cards. It’s teaching them content. Knowledge. Stuff! History and science, art and music, literature and geography. Yes, to little kids. (You know, the ones who are curious about EVERYTHING. Who can learn a TON just by listening to a good read-aloud story.)

E.D. Hirsch has argued for 30 years that the key to building students’ vocabularies, and thus their ability to read and learn, is content knowledge. Once a child learns to decode, her “comprehension” ability mainly comes down to the store of knowledge she’s got in her head. If she can sound out words but can’t read a passage about dinosaurs, it’s not because she hasn’t been taught “comprehension skills”—it’s probably because she’s never been taught anything about dinosaurs.

Yet our preschools and elementary schools systematically reject this obvious approach because they deem it not “developmentally appropriate.” Furthermore, they say, why teach all those “facts” when kids can just Google them?

The problem is compounded by a lamentable reaction by many high-poverty schools to testing and No Child Left Behind: They delay teaching social studies and science until 4th or 5th grade so they can focus on teaching reading in the early grades. Which is nuts—teaching content is teaching reading.

I could go on and on about this, as the folks at the Core Knowledge blog and the cognitive scientist Dan Willingham often do. Do you follow their work?

Let me end on a hopeful note: I believe that the Common Core State Standards will help fix this problem. The English/language arts standards were heavily influenced by Hirsch’s thinking (which is why he’s endorsed them), as they expect students to engage with rich and challenging texts—both fiction and non-fiction in subjects like history, science, and geography—as early as possible.

If schools want to do well on common-core assessments, they had better start teaching their students knowledge. (Using Hirsch’s Core Knowledge Language Arts program would be an excellent place to start.)

If the common-core standards help to bring back art and music, science and history, civics and literature to our elementary school classrooms, don’t you think it’s worth supporting? Given that there is excellent scientific evidence for the role of vocabulary—and thus, knowledge—in academic success, and given that the knowledge gap is clearly a major contributor to the “opportunity gap,” and given that you have been a long-time advocate for greater equity, won’t you reconsider your position on the common core? I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

-Mike Petrilli

Deborah Meier’s response appears here.

Of course we should have more of all of those—provided they’re accompanied by suitable quality control and customer-information strategies. But why so bleak about parent triggers? Well, Mike explains, they’ll get tangled up in lawsuits—but so does every single one of his preferred options; just this week, for example, the Louisiana supreme court struck down the Bayou State’s new voucher program. Charters get litigated everywhere. So do virtual schools.

Then he says the parent trigger is really a school-turnaround strategy and turnarounds seldom succeed in turning bad schools into good ones. He might try telling that to Arne Duncan, to Congress, and to a throng of states and districts—and philanthropists and nonprofit and for-profit groups—that, for better or worse, have placed enormous hope and many resources in schemes for effecting such turnarounds. No, they’re not very good at it, but most analysts say that school turnarounds generally fail because those involved in them seldom make the wrenching changes—personnel above all—that are most apt to yield something truly different and better. What could be more wrenching than the kind of governance-and-control shift brought about by a successful parent trigger? No, we cannot be confident that the newly empowered parents will then entrust their school to truly competent educators—that remains to be seen. But there’s much about parents that we cannot be confident of, including their capacity to make wise choices among the new school options that Mike puts so much faith in.

Mike’s third argument is that the parent trigger won’t be powerful enough to change the district itself—but then he acknowledges that nothing is powerful enough! Then he half backtracks at the very end and says, well, maybe choice will.

But of course he knows better. Districts only improve if their own leaders are determined to make that happen, and that’s far too rare a situation in American education. They only respond to competition—that is, respond constructively to competition—if they’re well led, not brain-dead, and not completely entangled in their own bureaucratics, contracts, and governance malfunctions. Let’s assume that most bad districts are going to stay bad. Then the job of serious reformers, Mike included, is to give kids every possible exit from them into something better. Helping an entire school to extricate itself from the dysfunctional system is surely one such strategy. Instead of pooh-poohing it, how about we put it on the list of possibilities, wish it well, and do our damnedest to help it succeed as often as possible?

My parent-trigger glass isn’t more than half full. But Mike needs to return to the spigot.

—Chester E. Finn, Jr.

This blog entry first appeared in the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

One of the more critical conversations occurred on Sunday to kick off the week. The topic, ironically enough though, was about a meeting that happens rarely in education.

Bror Saxberg, chief learning officer at Kaplan, organized a panel discussion at the AERA meeting about why learning scientists and educational entrepreneurs don’t connect that much. I, along with Dick Clark of USC, Kenneth Koedinger, co-director of the Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center, Michael Moe of GSV Capital , Stacey Childress of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Nadya Dabby from the U.S. Department of Education, discussed not only how these conversations don’t happen, but the fundamental reasons why they don’t.

Saxberg and many others have noted that, all too often, products and services in the education market are not informed by what we know about learning. As a result, these new offerings tend to start at ground zero and do not take advantage of what’s become, over the past couple of decades in particular, a sizeable literature about how people learn and how to design optimal learning experiences.

Although learning scientists have far more to learn—and some of the biggest advances I believe will occur in the field instead of the lab given the rise of adaptive learning products—not having products informed by what’s known about learning as a starting point is often a big miss for students. Yet we see it all the time.

To take a notable example, people from the biggest of the massive open online course platforms, Coursera, often talk about how exciting it is that they can do A-B testing to learn what works. With the massive user base they have and the big data they are able to collect, there is indeed a huge potential for breakthroughs. What sort of A-B testing are they doing though? One professor, for example, tested whether showing his face during a lesson led to improved learning. What’s sad about that is that the research to answer these sorts of questions is already well established.

From a higher level, it often seems that the best business plans in education have the least interesting learning science behind them, and the worst business plans in education have the most interesting learning science behind them. On the panel, Koedinger, a co-founder of Carnegie Learning, confirmed the point when he talked about how once he and his team had brought their research-informed product to market, the majority of the market incentives encouraged them not to improve the product along its ability to help students learn.

This points to the first of the three ideas I offered in my opening remarks as to why educational entrepreneurs and learning scientists don’t talk all that much: In public education, the incentives don’t encourage educational entrepreneurs to seek out what’s known from learning science. The products that win in the marketplace aren’t necessarily those that are the best for learning, as the policies in public K-12 education in particular are focused heavily on input-based metrics that encourage compliance, but not student learning growth. As a result, seeking out what’s known about how students learn and improving products accordingly isn’t necessarily rewarded. To change this, we need to fix the demand-side problem. Moving from a policy environment that rewards inputs like seat time to one that values student outcomes in a competency-based learning environment is critical to create smarter demand.

Second, entrepreneurs sometimes suffer from the “We went to school, therefore we are experts” mentality—when in fact, what we think we know about how learning works from our experiences is often incorrect. Because entrepreneurs have this notion, they either think they can extrapolate to solve system-wide problems for which they don’t have a solid understanding of causality or they can utilize a lean startup approach and figure it out on the ground. There is a lot to be said for leveraging a lean startup—or discovery-driven—approach. But in a discovery-driven process, the goal is to identify assumptions, test them and gain knowledge as fast and cheaply as possible. Leveraging good research that has already created a knowledge base does just that. Ignoring it is a mistake.

Finally, researchers have a long way to go to help solve the problem. The catalog of sessions at AERA was the weight of a phonebook. Outside of asking Saxberg what sessions would be useful, I had no hope of navigating it. We need more education research about things that actually matter in the field and are relevant for teachers and students. We need more translation of good research into the popular domain to help people understand more widely what is the good research and what does it say. Today every company seems to have a research study that they bring to districts validating what they do. How to clarify what’s good? And we need faster research that takes advantage of the massive amounts of data we can generate about education through digital learning.

In the panel conversation, the lack of good networks, better use of the emerging edtech incubators, the structure of federal research funding, the lag-time between learning and tangible results, and other things surfaced as additional facets of the problem. In seeking to fix this, I’m curious though: what else have you observed as something that holds this back? Students await the answer.

-Michael Horn

This blog entry first appeared on Forbes.com

I believe there is. Let me introduce the open-source school district.

Imagine the creation of a virtual school district. It wouldn’t have any actual students, teachers, buses, or facilities, but it would have a school board, a superintendent, and a central-office staff. (The superintendent and staff would be paid real salaries and be housed in a real office; the school board would be made up of various “education experts” or maybe “stakeholders” who, like real school board members, would volunteer their time.) It would be given a demographic profile—say, a medium-sized, inner-ring suburban district of 10,000 with a fair amount of racial and socioeconomic diversity. It would inherit the student achievement results, policies, and practices of a typical district. We’d situate it in an actual state, too.

This “school district” would be charged with developing and constantly updating a strategy for improving achievement and otherwise addressing the needs of its fictitious students. The board and superintendent might start by laying out a schedule for the year in which they would look at different key topics every month. Maybe in September, they would tackle a plan for implementing the Common Core. In October, they would look at teacher and principal evaluations. In November, they would consider how to improve students’ non-cognitive skills. And so forth.

The “central office” would have staff working in roles similar to real districts: an assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction, a chief human-resources person, a budget director, etc. These people might serve a faux district, but they would develop real plans to present to their superintendent and board. And—this is key—they would have tremendous resources to tap in helping them put these plans or policies or budgets together. Namely, they would have a big research budget and/or access to professionals at a think tank like the American Institutes of Research to help them sift through all of the relevant research, ideas, promising practices, and vendor pitches.

Imagine what might happen if such a “school district” took off. First, it would develop policies, procedures, and plans that would be as robust as technocratically possible—aligned with the latest and greatest research and thinking available. These policies, procedures, and plans could then be swiped (or adapted) by real school districts for their own use. Second, it would provide small vendors of excellent products, think tankers with promising ideas, and advocacy groups brimming with sound suggestions with a national platform by which to spread the word. Everyone would know that if you wanted your policy or nostrum or solution to spread, you had to convince the open-source school district that it was worth embracing.

Of course, this would only work if actual school-board members, superintendents, central-office staff, and principals knew about it and found it helpful. It would be critical to get them involved—not just as recipients of the “content” produced by the OSSD but as producers themselves. (This is what makes it “open source.”) They could join digital communities with others in their roles (all of the superintendents or HR managers, etc.) and interact with OSSD staffers as they develop their work products. If practicing educators had an idea or product or policy or practice that worked, they could share it with the virtual educator—and thus, the entire network. They could also watch the school board in action via a live stream or after the fact via video.

I’m convinced that an open-source school district would be a fascinating experiment and would probably produce some excellent materials. It wouldn’t be perfect—every state is different, for instance, so real-live district folks would have to adapt materials and approaches for their own contexts. Furthermore, there would be no way to replicate the true push and pull of local politics with which real districts must contend. (How to come up with a model teacher-union contract, for instance, in the absence of a teacher union?) One could also imagine all manner of lobbying and political pressure being placed on this faux district if its decisions affected the “real” marketplace. Board members and staff would need to be chosen carefully. Everything would need to be totally transparent.

I think those of us in the “idea-generating” business would be sobered by the experience. We would gain a better appreciation of the huge amount of conflicting advice and pressure that school districts and their leaders face. In fact, the most interesting part of the experiment would be seeing how the OSSD handles competing priorities and a policy environment that is anything but coherent. It might help us better understand which state and federal policies are helping districts improve and which are getting in the way.

And (in anticipation of my colleague Andy Smarick’s reaction) yes, this assumes that school districts still have a major role to play for the foreseeable future. While that may not be the case in some of our big cities, I think the familiar structures will endure throughout most of the country and its suburbs and small towns. And it’s the small- to medium-sized districts—which serve nearly half of the nation’s public school students—that could benefit the most from this initiative, as they don’t have the scale to have much central-office capacity.

Think this idea has promise? Do you represent school boards, or superintendents, or central office staff? Or do you have money to give away? Let’s talk.

—Mike Petrilli

This post originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

Big happenings on the urban-schools front. In recent weeks, numerous cities have announced they’re looking for new district leaders. In Boston, the search is on for Carol Johnson’s replacement. New Jersey, having just taken over Camden, is looking for someone to fill the top job. Baltimore’s Andres Alonso just announced his departure. Indy is looking for a new schools supe. Detroit is searching for someone to take over now that the emergency manager has retired. Oakland is in the same place.

So will these cities’ leaders take the same path as their predecessors over the last half century and choose another set of “district fixers,” those who mistakenly believe they can turn this irreparably broken institution into a high-performing organization? (Sadly, probably yes.) Or one or more of these cities could decide to build The Urban School System of the Future and choose leaders dedicated to bringing the failed urban district to an end and replacing it with a true system of schools. (Prayerfully, and this Nashville report, p. 30, gives me hope…)

Common Core as soap opera

So much drama going on with Common Core these days. Lots of states are having renewed conversations about the merits of standards. Checker pens a very strong pro-CCSS piece that explains how they came into being and how they fit into the much longer history of standards. The head of the AFT says we need to slow down on implementation and not yet tie consequences to the new CCSS-aligned assessments. TNTP’s Tim Daly says push ahead.

Distance makes the blogging grow frustrated

Rick Hess, back from a Cage-Busting sabbatical, returns to his blog to set fire to the rain, taking down two research orgs, the secretary, DFER, and Merrow. I’ve been increasingly bothered by the group-think that’s set in across the ed-reform landscape, so I’m thankful Rick is showing that well-informed contrariness has a valuable role to play in our world.

-Andy Smarick

This blog entry first appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

The Pope Center for Higher Education Policy (which I head) offers a somewhat different solution to the same problem. We believe that the federal government should inject an element of merit into the selection of Pell
grantees. Thus, in a paper on Pell grants, Jenna Ashley Robinson and Duke Cheston recommend that Pell grant recipients have SAT scores of at least 850 (verbal and math) and a high school GPA of at least 2.5 (between a C and a B).

“Not only would this save taxpayer money, it would provide a positive incentive for students to do better in school,” they write. ”Students with very low high school academic performance are unlikely to graduate from college regardless of financial aid.”

The two solutions are similar, of course. As we see it, the advantage of our proposal is that it’s an objective standard that would be easy to enforce. Under Petrilli’s proposal, I would worry (as he does) about colleges
re-naming remedial courses as “regular” courses, something that may already be happening.

The SAT score we recommend, 850, isn’t high. According to the College Board, in order to have a 65 percent chance of getting a B- average in college, students should achieve about 1030 on the math and verbal SATs and earn a B average in high school (taking courses of at least “average” rigor).  Using this benchmark,
only 32 percent of students taking the SATs in 2009 were fully college-ready! On the other hand, to have a chance at a C average in college, they can get by with a 730 score on math and verbal, says the
College Board.

But even getting a C average would be a struggle for these students, and the possibility of failure or dropping is out is all too likely.  Pell grants should be changed to cope with this reality, and Petrilli and the Pope
Center offer promising ways to do it.

-Jane S. Shaw

Behind the Headline
How Can Schools Best Educate Hispanic Students?
Education Next |Spring 2013

Hispanic students have now passed white students as the largest ethnic group in Texas schools, making up almost 51 percent of public school enrollment, the Dallas Morning News reports. The Spring 2013 issue of Education Next includes a forum on how our schools can best educate Hispanic students.

-Education Next

What, you ask, is this all about?

Thirty years after a blue-ribbon panel declared the United States to be “a nation at risk” due to the weak performance and shoddy results of our public education system, one of the two great reforms to have enveloped that system is the setting of explicit academic standards in core subjects, standards that make clear what math youngsters should know by the end of fifth grade, what reading-and-writing skills they must acquire by tenth grade, and so on. (The other great reform: widespread acceptance of school choice.)

Up to now, individual states have set their own academic standards. Some did this well, but according to reviews undertaken by Fordham and others, most stumbled badly, putting forth vague expectations that lack content and rigor and often promote left-wing dogma. And even the good ones differ so much from state to state that school and student performance cannot be compared around the country, much less with other lands.

Public education is indisputably the responsibility of states—embedded deeply in their constitutions—but preparing young Americans to succeed in a mobile society on a shrinking and more competitive planet calls for some commonality of education expectations across the land, expectations that, if met, truly prepare young people for college and good jobs.

Many state leaders understand this and, beginning five years ago, the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers (to which most state superintendents belong) launched a foundation-funded project called the Common Core State Standards Initiative, which gave birth to a set of commendably strong standards for English language arts and math from Kindergarten through high school. Our reviewers found them superior to the academic expectations set by three-quarters of states—and essentially on par with the rest.

But would states actually embrace them in place of their own? This was—and remains—totally voluntary, but decisions grew more complicated when the Obama administration started pushing states toward such adoptions by jawboning, hectoring, and luring them with dollars and regulatory waivers.

Whether it was the standards’ intrinsic merit, administration pressure, or the potential advantages of commonality—not just comparability but also cheaper textbooks and tests that need not be tailored to each state’s specifications—forty-five states plus D.C., several territories, and the Pentagon’s school network signed on. (Texas and Virginia are the big exceptions.) The top-priority education initiative in most of those places today is preparing teachers, parents, and others for these demanding standards—and for the likelihood that scores will plummet on the tougher tests now under development.

Then came the backlash. Some arose on the left from foes of testing and teacher groups wary of being evaluated against sterner criteria. Some arose from parents and educators fretful that heavier emphasis on English language arts and math will eclipse music, art, and the rest of a balanced curriculum.

The heavy artillery, however, came from the right. In true tea-party style, the Common Core was presented as a federal plot—worse, an Obama plot, in cahoots with the Gates Foundation, maybe even the United Nations—to take over American schools, end local control, undermine state sovereignty, and abolish school choice. Some decried the Common Core as a lowering of standards because, for example, it doesn’t mandate algebra in eighth grade. (Never mind that few eighth graders study real algebra today.) Others prophesied that Jane Austen and Mark Twain would be replaced by close study of auto-repair manuals. (The list of recommended readings that accompanies the Common Core is excellent—but bad choices by teachers or curriculum directors can subvert any standards.)

Many respected conservatives back the Common Core, including such scarred veterans of the education-reform wars as Jeb Bush, Bill Bennett, Chris Christie, Rod Paige, and Mitch Daniels. They understand that academic standards are just the beginning, describing a destination but not how to get there. They understand, too, that a destination worth reaching beats aimless wandering—and that a big modern country is better off if it knows how all its kids and schools are doing against a rigorous set of common expectations. As good conservatives, they realize that the Common Core in the long run should save dollars, enhance accountability, hasten development of powerful instructional technologies, strengthen American competitiveness, give a boost to the country’s shared civic culture, and (by supplying parents with better information about school performance) advance school choice.

They also recognize, however, that the Common Core is voluntary and that states unserious about implementing it are better off not pretending to embrace it.

Some day, we’ll know whether schools and students in the Common Core states do better than those in places that opt to go it alone. It’s hard to imagine that they’ll do worse.

Education reform is hard. Admiral Rickover once compared it to “moving a graveyard.” Standards-setting is just part of it—and common standards aren’t inherently better. (Newly released standards for science appear to have serious shortcomings.) But when a group of state leaders, many of them Republicans, can come together to set expectations for the curricular core that surpass what most of them set on their own, conservatives ought to applaud, not lash out.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr.

This blog entry first appeared in the Fordham Institute’s Education Gadfly Weekly.

I love this thing—great data on a critically important part of our field. If you’re interested in chartering, school-level accountability, or The Urban School System of the Future, you definitely want to check it out.

Almost a decade ago, NACSA produced the equivalent of industry standards—the stuff a high-quality authorizer ought to do. These relate to assessing charter applications, monitoring school performance, helping grow high-performers, revoking the charters of low-performers, etc.

This report assesses authorizers against what NACSA deems the 12 “essential practices” of the industry.

Overall, authorizers’ scores improved over last year’s, and large authorizers (those with 10+ schools) scored better than small ones.

Continuing a long-term trend, authorizers are increasingly picky shoppers—they approve far fewer applications than they did back in the day. The average approval rate is now 33 percent.

But many authorizers are still falling short on the back end of accountability: 34 percent of authorizers lack a clear, established policy to close underperforming schools.

Some of the report’s most interesting findings relate to the different types of authorizers (there are six kinds nowadays). The vast majority (more than 90 percent) are local school districts, but they generally authorize few schools apiece; their portfolios combine for only 53 percent of all charters.

Districts score lower than non-district authorizers overall, and their policies are far less friendly to replication than non-district authorizers, meaning they are less likely to help great charters create more high-quality seats.

I strongly oppose permitting districts—especially failing urban districts—to authorize charters. In fact, I believe giving districts the power to authorize was the biggest charter-policy mistake made during this sector’s two decades of existence.

Why?

Charter laws broke the district’s monopoly over public school operation. But some state laws only allowed districts to authorize. This regrettably continued the district-centered era of public schooling; that is, in a geographic area, every public school must either be run or authorized by the district.

Fortunately, most states have since created non-district authorizers, but this legacy mistake continues to this day in a number of places, for example, Baltimore.

The major other problem is that giving districts authorizing power blurs the essential line between these two very different functions: running schools and overseeing others running schools.

We should see districts as school operators only. Authorizing—that is, umpiring, not playing, not coaching—is much, much different work. Districts are built to run schools; they are not designed to oversee from arms-length others doing so. In fact, many of their policies, habits, beliefs, and practices run counter to the essential charter bargain of freedom for tough accountability. And many district authorizers remain hostile to charters to this very day.

(Think I’m being too pessimistic about charter-district relations? How about Chicago’s district—the only charter authorizer for the nation’s third-largest city—which recently declared that buildings no longer needed by the district are off-limits to charters for 40 years.)

The report’s findings on other types of authorizers are really quite interesting. They have much to teach policymakers and practitioners. How are independent charter boards, like the one in Washington, D.C., doing? What about Indy’s mayor’s office or nonprofits?

Read the report and find out!

Two other thoughts: New research demonstrates that charters that struggle early on seldom improve significantly. It might be the case that NACSA’s (and the charter community’s) support for five-year contracts needs reassessing.

Second, as we move to a sector-agnostic approach in urban schooling and rely on a continuous improvement process based on new starts, expansions, and closures, we must develop rigorous, transparent systems for these activities. Successfully managing a portfolio of schools demands it.

It is troubling that many authorizers still don’t have high-quality practices in place for this work. We should prioritize improvement in these areas.

-Andy Smarick

This blog entry first appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Choice Words blog.

In a new Public Impact policy brief, A Better Blend: A Vision for Boosting Student Outcomes with Digital Learning, which we co-authored with Joe Ableidinger and Jiye Grace Han, we explain how schools can use blended learning to drive improvements in the quality of digital instruction, transform teaching into a highly paid, opportunity-rich career that extends the reach of excellent teachers to all students and teaching peers, and improve student learning at large scale. We call this a “better blend”: combining high-quality digital learning and excellent teaching.

The Promise of Blended Learning …

The potential of blended learning to improve student achievement arises from two benefits of blended models that build on each other. One is the power of digital instruction to personalize learning. The other is the capacity of blended models to let schools reach more students with excellent teachers who ensure that students achieve ambitious, personally fulfilling goals.

… Is Not a Guarantee

Technology in our classrooms is nothing new. At various points in the past century, leaders have hyped new technologies in schools, which have generally failed to meet the lofty expectations. Even blended models and other recent digital-learning initiatives have yielded mixed results. And other promising, recent reforms have shown that a lack of focus on teacher quality typically leads to disappointment.

Today’s blended models will likely fall short as well, unless they include excellent teachers playing instructional and team leadership roles that maximize technology’s impact in tandem with their own.

How Schools and Policymakers Can Create a Better Blend, Right Now

For a better blend of technology and teachers, schools must first focus on implementation to combine excellent technology and teaching. It would be easy to move toward blended learning while leaving students’ access to great teachers exactly as it is today. Instead, schools should shift to blended learning while enhancing teaching effectiveness, through:

• Selectivity: Hiring selectively based on indicators predictive of outstanding teaching
• Reach: Extending the reach of excellent teachers to more students, directly and through team leadership
• Freed Time: Scheduling to give teachers time to collaborate, develop, and analyze student learning data during school hours
• Accountability: Giving excellent teachers credit and accountability for the growth of all students under their purview, including those taught by the teachers on teams that they lead
• Authority: Vesting excellent teachers with control of the digital content they use, allowing them to continuously drive improvements in instructional materials in ways never possible previously
• Rewards: Investing savings in paying teachers far more for achieving excellence with more students, making stronger recruitment and enhanced selectivity possible.

Then, to achieve excellent learning at scale, state policymakers must change state policy to enable and incentivize a better blend in large numbers of schools, through:

• Funding that is flexible and weighted by student need, so that schools may invest in the people and technology that best advance their students’ learning
• People policies that let schools hire, develop, deploy, pay, advance, and retain excellent teachers and collaborative teaching teams to reach every student with excellent teachers
• Accountability, using increasingly better measures, that drives teaching and technology excellence and improvement, so that excellent teachers and their teams get credit for using blended learning to help more students, and schools have powerful incentives for a better blend
• Technology and student data that are available for all students, allowing differentiated instruction for all students without regard to their economic circumstances
• Timing and scalability, including implementing a better blend from the start in new and turnaround-attempt schools—when schools often have more freedoms to implement new staffing models that do not over-rely on the limited supply of outstanding school leaders. This also includes helping new schools develop systems for scale, and giving excellent new schools incentives to grow.

Digital learning may be life-changing for students and career-boosting for teachers, but only if schools and policymakers commit to a better blend.

–Bryan Hassel and Emily Ayscue Hassel

This blog post first appeared at EdTech Digest.

For some context, when No Child Left Behind required every state to adopt standards, create assessments aligned to those assessments, and build an accountability and reporting system, it gave states 44 months to do all of those things (from January 2002 to September 2005). Half the states already had standards and testing systems up and running, but many were starting basically from scratch, and the rest needed to make revisions. For comparison, the Common Core standards are new and more rigorous than existing standards, but they’re only one component of the full accountability apparatus, and all the states that have adopted the standards are relying on either one of the two assessment consortia or ACT to create assessments for them.

The Common Core standards were released in final form in June 2010. It is now almost May 2013, so states, districts, teachers, preparation programs, parents, unions, and students have had about 35 months with the final standards. The new standards won’t actually have consequences for schools and teachers in most states until 2014-15. If we assume the school year starts in September 2014, that will have been 51 months since the standards were adopted. Again, NCLB left 44 months to do everything; the Common Core allows 51 months to implement standards alone. If this isn’t enough time, what would be?

Weingarten also said that the federal government has not provided funds “specifically targeted to prepare teachers” for the Common Core. This is really just a sly way of saying Congress hasn’t dedicated a specific funding stream to support the implementation of the Common Core. Meanwhile, it provides $2.5 billion to support professional development that can be used to “improve the knowledge of teachers and principals and, in appropriate cases, paraprofessionals, concerning effective instructional strategies, methods, and skills, and use of challenging State academic content standards and student academic achievement standards, and State assessments, to improve teaching practices and student academic achievement.” In other words, Congress has provided, and continues to provide, districts with money to support the implementation of state standards such as the Common Core.

None of this mentions the work of the AFT, National Education Association, national foundations, teacher preparation institutions, assessment consortia (Smarter Balanced and PARCC), or other groups with a stake in the successful implementation of the Common Core. The next time you read a proposal about halting the Common Core, keep in mind all the time and money that’s already been spent.

—Chad Aldeman

Chad Aldeman is a senior policy analyst at Bellwether Education Partners.

This blog entry originally appeared on The Quick and The Ed.

Worthy though some of these efforts may be, none reveals the crux of the problem: A huge proportion of this $40 billion annual federal investment is flowing to people who simply aren’t prepared to do college-level work. And this is perverting higher education’s mission, suppressing completion rates and warping the country’s K-12 system.

About two-thirds of low-income community-college students — and one-third of poor students at four-year colleges — need remedial (aka “developmental”) education, according to Complete College America, a nonprofit group. But it’s not working: Less than 10 percent of students who start in remedial education graduate from community college within three years, and just 35 percent of remedial students earn a four-year degree within six years.

What if the government decreed that three years hence, students would only be eligible for Pell aid if enrolled in credit-bearing college courses, thus disqualifying remedial education for support?

One could foresee various possible outcomes. Let’s start with the positive. Ambitious, low-income high-school students would know that if they want to attend college at public expense (probably their only option), they would first need to become “college-ready.” This would provide a clear sign and incentives for them to work hard, take college-prep classes and raise their reading and math skills to the appropriate level.

Better Preparation

To be considered successful, the high schools serving these young people would need to get their college-bound students to a college-ready level, not just get them to graduation. They might offer more college-prep courses, especially for those pupils with the most promise, and make sure the teachers are up to the task.

Likewise, state officials concerned about college completion would be prodded to ensure that their high schools produce college-ready graduates, maybe boosting graduation standards accordingly. Better yet, they might start to include college matriculation and graduation rates in their high-school accountability systems.

As for colleges, without a federal funding stream for remedial education, many would decide to become more selective, only admitting students who are ready for credit-bearing courses.

This would probably raise the academic tenor of the institution, for students and professors alike. And with fewer students using Pell aid, we could afford to make each grant more generous, removing financial barriers that force well-prepared low-income students to leave before graduation, or not to come at all.

In sum, disqualifying the use of Pell grants for remedial education would substantially reduce the gap between the number of students entering higher education and the number completing degrees.

Yes, there are obvious downsides. Most significantly, many students wouldn’t be able to afford remedial education and thus would never go to college in the first place. Millions of potential Pell recipients — many of them minorities — might be discouraged from even entering the higher-education pipeline. Such an outcome seems unfair and cuts against the American tradition of open access, as well as second and third chances.

Then again, it’s not so certain that these individuals are better off trying college in the first place. Most don’t make it to graduation.

Job Training

Many would be more successful in job-training programs that don’t require college-level work (or would be better off simply gaining skills on the job). Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce estimates that more than a third of jobs today only require a high-school diploma or less. While these jobs won’t make young people rich, they will keep them out of the grip of poverty, and can propel them to new opportunities.

Furthermore, it isn’t fair to spend scarce dollars on students who aren’t prepared for college; those dollars could instead be used by needy students who are ready. It would be better to place our bets on low-income individuals who are most likely to succeed by boosting the maximum value of a Pell grant. (At $5,500 a year, it’s worth much less today than when Congress created the program decades ago.)

Perhaps the greatest risk is that colleges would respond to the new rules in a perverse manner: by giving credit for courses that used to be considered “remedial.” This would be the path of least resistance. Everyone could keep doing what they were doing before, with a wink and a nod, but would further dilute the value of a college degree.

It’s hard to know how many institutions would be willing to disregard academic integrity in such a way; one could imagine it being a lamentably large number. It would be incumbent on government agencies and watchdog groups to shame colleges that attempt to take this route.

On balance, withdrawing Pell subsidies from remedial courses appears promising enough to try. Congress should require the Education Department to create a demonstration program in which colleges and universities volunteer to eliminate their remedial courses and, in return, their qualified low-income students become eligible for more-generous Pell-grant money, thus reducing their own financial-aid obligation.

Perhaps offer the deal to an entire state. Study what happens. My guess is that it would have a salutary effect on the K-12 system, on higher education and on college-completion rates. Let’s find out.

-Mike Petrilli

This blog entry first appeared on Bloomberg View.

They do two things really, really well. First, they take part in on-the-ground, let’s-solve-this-problem human-capital activities. In partner cities across the nation, they train and certify teachers, develop and implement new evaluation systems, help administrators improve observations, and much more.

Chances are, if you’re hearing about interesting, innovative teacher or leader work in an urban area, TNTP is involved.

The second is that they put out these superb little reports. They’re always short and punchy, visually pleasing, terribly informative, and, in one way or another, unexpected. Teacher Evaluation 2.0 was a valuable how-to guide for discriminating policymakers, The Irreplaceables was a teacher-retention wake-up call, and, of course, The Widget Effect was a game-changer.

The organization is at its influential-powerful best when it combines its smarts and muscle—when it can use its research and analysis to inform the field and then help implement the change. For example, TNTP’s findings on the appalling state of teacher evaluations helped shape the Race to the Top application, precipitated a wave of state-level statutory changes, and kicked off some of TNTP’s most meaningful partnerships with states and districts.

Leap Year, the organization’s latest offering, follows in this fine research-meets-practice tradition.

It looks under the hood of the first year of teaching. The conventional wisdom holds that all teachers are lousy out of the gates, so we treat the rookie season, says the report, “like a warm-up lap.”

But there’s much more to this story.

Using its “Assessment of Classroom Effectiveness” (ACE) tool, a multiple-measures evaluation system designed specifically for new teachers, TNTP assessed new educators via observations, student surveys, growth data, and principal ratings.

Among the lessons learned: Not all teachers struggle from the start; in fact, nearly 25 percent score in the top two categories (out of five) in their first observation.

Similarly, while most teachers improve throughout their first year (.2 points on a five-point scale for each observation), many do not. One-quarter of those later denied certification started off poorly and actually got worse over the year.

In fact, just like a charter school’s early performance can accurately predict its later performance, a teacher’s first-year performance tells us a great deal about his/her ability to improve. Teachers who received certification after their first year had an average score of 3.14 on their first observations; those denied certification scored around 2.50, on average, on that first observation.

In fact, writes the report, “Teachers who are performing poorly in their first year rarely show dramatic improvement in their second year.” This includes even those teachers who—thought to have potential despite early struggles—were given a second year (an “extension plan”) to earn certification.

“After more than a year in the classroom, not a single extension-plan teacher earned an observation score in the (top two) categories.”

There are plenty more fascinating tidbits throughout the report; you’ll learn about training and norming observers, using student surveys, adjusting for the inflation of principal ratings, and cultivating early skill sets in teachers.

But probably my favorite new fact relates to improving observations. It turns out that more observations aren’t the key; more observers are. “When assessing tradeoffs between adding observers and adding observations, the evidence is fairly clear—adding observers gives the greater boost to reliability. Giving teachers three different observers, instead of the same observer for each round, significantly increases the reliability of observations.”

The only complaint I had with the report is actually a complaint about an element of the underlying system, specifically, the names of the five rating categories—in order: “Ineffective, Minimally Effective, Developing, Proficient, and Skillful.”

Give 100 reasonable people those names and ask them the best, second-best, etc., I would happily gamble that less than half would choose this exact order.

Complaining about the discrepancy between a classification title and its content may seem like semantics, but it’s more than that. We have such troubled evaluation systems, I believe, partly because we still don’t have honest conversations about effectiveness. By muddying what’s meant with these indecipherable category names, we contribute to the problem.

But this is a minor matter when compared to the serious strengths of the report.

What’s most exciting is that, unlike evaluation and tenure reform, which required new laws in most states, most state departments of education can singlehandedly (or with their state boards) alter certification rules through regulation.

That means an enterprising state chief could swiftly turn this report’s findings into policy. Don’t approve prep programs graduating candidates unprepared for that critical first year; make sure early professional development builds foundational skills; prioritize additional observers over additional observations; and make permanent certification contingent on proof of success.

I’m all but certain a number of states will take this report’s lessons to heart, and once again it will be said that TNTP influenced for the better our educator policies and practices.

-Andy Smarick

This blog entry first appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

The America Achieves study reveals in an alternate way an international achievement gap that my colleagues and I have been identifying over the past three years (see “Teaching Math to the Talented,” features, Winter 2011; “Are U.S. Students Ready to Compete?” features, Fall 2011; “Is the U.S. Catching Up?” features, Fall 2012). In those papers, we report that the most talented U.S. students dreadfully lag peers abroad in math, that the percentage of U.S. students who are proficient is seriously lagging, and that the rate of improvement in the United States is no better than average. We develop the implications in a book the Brookings Institution will release this summer under the title Endangering Prosperity: A Global View of the American School.

Both our studies and the one America Achieves has just released rely on the Program for International Assessment (PISA), a series of surveys of student achievement in math, science, and reading administered to 15-year-olds in most countries of the industrialized world. America Achieves’ contribution is to group students by social and educational “advantage” into four quarters, using an index based on such items as a poverty indicator, educational environment at home, and quality of peer group at school. The organization then focuses its analysis on students in the second and third quarter—those just above and below the median student. By this device, analysts can discover whether the education problem in the United States disappears if one ignores, statistically, the most disadvantaged students.

America Achieves has not chosen the perfect analytical strategy. For one thing, it assumes the distribution of social advantage is identical in all countries, when it can hardly be the case that the same percentage of Swiss and Dutch children are socially disadvantaged as children in Poland and Hungary. A direct measure of family social background would be better than one that mixes in such factors as books in the home and the quality of peers at school. These educational considerations cannot be called “social” without twisting words out of their ordinary meaning.

But the study is solid enough to embarrass the group of teachers union leaders and liberal academics that calls itself the Broader, Bolder Approach to school reform (see “Neither Broad Nor Bold,” check the facts, Summer 2012). According to this influential group, the way to fix education in America is to eliminate poverty in America. If Broader, Bolder’s analysis were correct, then students who are not in the lowest quarter of the social spectrum should be doing just as well as similarly situated peers abroad.

That simply is not happening, as the America Achieves study demonstrates. Even if we ignore disadvantaged students both in the United States and abroad, U.S. performance ranks low in both math and science, and, to a lesser extent, in reading.

Also embarrassed by the America Achieves study is the lefty labor Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., which recently released a sophomoric study (see my January 16, 2013, post on the Education Next blog) that tried to use the PISA data to attribute educational deficiencies to the U.S. social structure, not its school system.

The America Achieves results show that there is only one way to alter the international achievement gap in education: fix how students are learning. That suggestion sounds like a truism. It would be, were it not for the organized forces that insist on disputing the obvious.

— Paul E. Peterson

Behind the Headline
The Turnaround Fallacy
Education Next |Winter 2010

While the Obama Administration is investing billions of dollars in efforts to turn around failing schools, many experts note that turnaround efforts almost never work, and that starting new schools may be a better investment. Andy Smarick, who is featured prominently in this morning’s USA Today story, first wrote about this topic in the Winter 2010 issue of Ed Next, where he laid out the case against school turnarounds.

-Education Next

For eons, the plot was the same: the district owns and operates all public schools in a geographic area. The subplot, at least in urban America, was that most of those schools weren’t delivering on the promise of public education.

Chartering, which crept on stage in 1991, subtly but importantly showed that entities besides districts could run public schools—and often run them better. Soon thereafter, Michigan and Massachusetts, adding dimension to the character, showed that non-district entities could also authorize (approve, monitor, renew, close) public schools.

The district’s monopoly grip on public education was broken.

Over the past two decades, chartered schools got more and more stage time, breaking into nearly every state and growing to capture larger market shares in America’s cities: 10, 15, 20, 30 percent in some areas.

Then the plot added a new twist, as state departments of education were empowered to take over individual schools and even entire districts.

This didn’t go so well. State agencies didn’t know what to do with the schools and districts they took over. Low performance continued, and this character embarrassingly slunk offstage, at least in most performances.

But this role wasn’t a total loss. It provided more evidence that public schools could be operated, monitored, and governed in various ways.

We’ve not reached the end of the play yet (and may never), but so far the high point was swift post-Katrina expansion of Louisiana’s Recovery School District. This state-controlled body has the authority to take over low-performing schools and their facilities and close them, run them, or hand their operations to someone else. But it’s not the state education department. It’s a specialized entity, a sort of virtual district, answerable to the state.

Now the dominant force in New Orleans, with a hand in schools educating four of every five kids in the Crescent City, the RSD has been instrumental in fundamentally—and hopefully forever—changing our understanding of the delivery of public schooling.

No one is better positioned to understand and explain the arc of this story, reveal its complications, pick out its nuances, and suggest its possibilities than Nelson Smith. The original executive director of the D.C. Public Charter School Board, former president of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, current senior advisor to the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, and much more, Smith understands chartering and school governance inside and out.

So when a new character bounds onto the stage and you need an expert critic at your side to help make sense of it all, Nelson’s your guy.

This is why Fordham asked him to write the story of Tennessee’s relatively new Achievement School District (ASD), a semi-clone of the RSD. In this excellent short paper, Smith offers a combination of history, reporting, and analysis; it is straightforward, sober, but quite hopeful.

The reader walks away understanding not just the ASD’s struggles, vulnerabilities, and potential, but also its context. This is invaluable to those interested in dramatically improving urban schooling, but especially for those, like me, who are convinced that the traditional urban district structure should’ve been banished from the theater a long time ago.

The paper takes us through the history of structural school-improvement strategies, then describes the genesis of the ASD. Created in the Race-to-the-Top-application era to convince federal proposal-scorers that Tennessee was serious about its failing schools, the ASD was charged with, well, doing exactly that.

With powers similar to Louisiana’s RSD but different in important ways, Tennessee’s ASD can take over schools and run them or team up with third-party operators.

If you want details on how schools are made eligible for takeover or how they exit ASD control, you’ll get them.

More interesting to me, though, was learning how Chris Barbic—former superstar charter-network leader and first and current ASD head—shaped the new body through imaginative approaches to growth, operator recruitment, school matching, community engagement, human capital, and more. I’m a big Barbic fan, so I’m probably biased, but his success in landing superb school operators, expanding his portfolio slowly, and avoiding unnecessary fights is quite impressive.

At this point, I’m of the mind that the ASD/RSD model, though it is a giant leap in our evolving understanding of public school governance and operation, is not the long-term solution for what city kids need. Such bodies are designed to have a statewide reach, and their control of schools is meant to be temporary. I believe we need a new school-delivery and governance model that is city-specific and city-driven and that such a system should replace the district, not work around it. The RSD, in practice, is close to that, but the ongoing battle over local recapture of taken-over schools will continue until the district is permanently decommissioned.

But these are arguments at the margins. The RSD is infinitely superior to the failed urban district and, though the ASD is still the understudy, thanks to Barbic’s tutelage, we may soon see its name in lights.

-Andy Smarick

This blog entry first appeared in the Fordham Institute’s Education Gadfly Weekly.

We didn’t know for certain how well the design processes would go. We chose these districts because they had leaders who showed real commitment to expanding the impact and authority of already-excellent teachers and a burning passion to help disadvantaged students. But would that be enough?

We shared design process principles, which include teacher involvement in design decisions. We shared five Reach Extension Principles for the new school models they would craft or tailor to their needs; they call for reaching more students with excellent teachers in charge of their learning, for more pay, within budget, while boosting development opportunities for all teachers and clarifying authority/credit for great teachers.

But we didn’t know how school teams would respond. Could they make design decisions that gained administrators’ support? How would the many good, solid teachers in these schools who were not on the design teams respond to their peers’ design choices? Would the teams craft roles that appealed to excellent teaching peers for recruiting purposes? All of these schools are high-poverty, and these teachers are no strangers to repeated “school improvement” efforts that can easily provoke skepticism.

On all fronts, these school teams exceeded our expectations.

Teachers took the lead in most schools, and in others they worked collaboratively with administrators to make decisions about what reach models to adopt and flesh out the design details. One school came up with its own model, a “time-time swap” (a variation on a time-technology swap described here), in which paraprofessionals supervise some student learning time at school—not unusual except that it will be scheduled to enable teachers to reach more students and collaborate in teams. Nearly all the school teams chose to combine several models to reach more students with great teachers, add team collaboration time, and let excellent teachers lead and develop their peers.

When team members presented their plans to other teachers in the schools (using variations of materials about teacher careers and the Opportunity Culture vision), they got a positive response. Any backlash we feared was apparently quelled by the designs these teams chose: They focused as much on developing excellence among peers as reaching more students with excellence directly.

Charlotte, the first site to recruit for these roles, received 708 applications for 26 positions in its four pilot schools. Is it any wonder? Teachers in reach roles can earn anywhere from about $4,500 to $23,000 more next year for helping more students and leading peers—all within budget, so the money won’t disappear when a grant ends. Nashville likewise is receiving strong interest in its recruiting. (Some positions in schools are being filled with teachers already on board—these schools chose to have all apply alongside the external candidates.)

The ultimate test will be how many more students these teachers can help make outstanding progress, not just in the first year, but in subsequent years as more teachers on new teams break through to excellence with the help of their outstanding peers. We know that they will likely need to keep improving their reach models. And they will be learning how to work in schools that take down the walls between teachers with an explicit purpose of achieving excellence for all students and staff.

Meanwhile, we’re really excited for the teachers and students in these schools. It’s what our Opportunity Culture work is all about—hope for achieving extraordinary things, with sustainable school models led by proven, excellent teachers to back it up.

—Bryan Hassel and Emily Ayscue Hassel

Change the incentives and watch schools embrace change, I would have argued. Hold superintendents, principals, and teachers to account for raising test scores. Subject them to real competition. Then voila: They would spend night and day looking for promising innovations to improve achievement and better serve families.

Well, we know how that’s turned out. We’ve put a lot of those incentives in place, and schools (and educators) still don’t seem to embrace good ideas, even the non-controversial, inexpensive kind. Take, for instance, the following:

*Bring “departmentalization” to elementary schools by asking strong math teachers to teach math and strong reading teachers to teach reading. Don’t ask anybody to do both.

*Maintain a robust science and social studies program in elementary schools. E.D. Hirsch and others have demonstrated for decades that the best way to raise reading scores is to make sure students build a strong vocabulary and a strong knowledge base; elsewise, they won’t comprehend what they’re reading. Yet schools nationwide have pushed aside science and social studies to make room for mega-ELA blocks.

*Extend the “reach” of excellent teachers via larger class sizes (with greater pay), new roles for master teachers, or technology. (Public Impact is chock-full of revenue-neutral ideas on this front.)

To be fair, there has been some good news lately, most notably Tom Loveless’s recent finding that ability grouping, after being shunned in the 1980s and 90s, is back in vogue. Since this is a commonsense way to “differentiate instruction” and help all students get the classroom challenges that they need and that will do them the most good, I would count it as a win. (Loveless speculates that NCLB-style accountability might have prodded schools to use this approach, since it works. Incentives!)

Still, on the whole, the picture isn’t pretty. What gives? Surely some economists would argue that the incentives we’ve put in place to date aren’t strong enough. Even now, few educators lose their jobs if test scores don’t rise. Principals and teachers don’t generally stand to make much more money if they achieve breakthrough results (or attract gobs more customers). And competition, at least in most cities, is still quite limited.

All true. But there could be something simpler at work: Perhaps many educators have never even encountered these ideas. Principals and teachers are so busy with the day-to-day struggle of their jobs—and now with new demands brought on by Common Core, new evaluation systems, and more—that they just keep their heads down and try to survive. They don’t have the time—or take the time—to read journals or blogs, to look for new innovations, to talk to colleagues, or to wonder about better ways of doing things. In this view, we have an “innovation-dissemination” (or “research-to-practice”) challenge.

I’ll admit, that sounds like a bit of a cop-out, especially for principals. The leader of any organization knows that part of his or her job is to look for better ways to do things and to stay current on trends in the field. We should expect no less from our school leaders, and those without an innate curiosity and drive for continuous improvement should be screened out of the profession.

But these principals do face an avalanche of information and advocacy from the government, from think tanks, and especially from vendors. Sifting through it all and turning the best bits and pieces into a coherent approach is no easy task. (And this has been a problem forever.)

Could we make that task more manageable? Could we help principals and superintendents to separate the wheat from the chaff in terms of the ideas that come across their desks on a given day? Stay tuned for my thoughts on that. In the meantime, I’d love to hear yours.

-Mike Petrilli

This first appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

I expect that PARCC and Smarter Balanced (the two federally subsidized consortia of states that are developing new assessments meant to be aligned with Common Core standards) will fade away, eclipsed and supplanted by long-established yet fleet-footed testing firms that already possess the infrastructure, relationships, and durability that give them huge advantages in the competition for state and district business.

In particular, I predict (as does Andy Smarick) that the new ACT-Aspire assessment system, which is supposed to be ready for use in 2014 (a full year earlier than either of the consortium products) and which some states are considering as their new assessment vehicle, will be joined by kindred products to be developed and marketed by the College Board. And the two of them will dominate the market for new Common Core assessments.

One straw in the wind: Alabama’s announcement last week that it is foreswearing both consortia and will use the ACT assessment system. And, of course, both Kentucky and New York have already concocted and deployed their own versions of Common Core assessments—possibly but not necessarily interim models.

Although the College Board and ACT have traditionally focused on the high-school-to-college transition, both also have experience earlier in the K–12 sequence. ACT Explore is aimed at eighth and ninth graders, ACT Engage goes down to sixth grade, and ACT “WorkKeys” is a significant player in determining career-readiness. The College Board’s Pre-SAT test is typically taken in tenth grade. Its “Readiness Pathway” assessment program reaches down to eighth grade, and its “Springboard” program to sixth—with “alignment” guides already prepared for Common Core standards in both English language arts and math for grades six through twelve.

So it’s not too big a stretch for either organization to dip deeper into the K–12 curriculum and assessment business, and it’s no stretch at all for their chief test-administration partners—Pearson in the case of ACT, ETS for the College Board. Each has ample experience in devising and administering tests from the early grades onward. (In fact, Pearson already has pre-K assessments.)

At least as importantly, these organizations know how to give tests to millions of people. They have the infrastructure and the test security. They have the systems for scoring and reporting. Perhaps above all, they have the relationships and the trust of thousands of school systems, dozens of states, and millions of parents.Plenty of states already use ACT products as part of their existing assessment systems. And both organizations are long established, well led, deep-pocketed, and pretty sure to be around a decade or two from now.

As yet, the new consortia have none of those things. They’re struggling with organizational structures, governance, post-federal financing, test-development agonies, uncertain costs, conflicting views of “cut scores,” and all manner of other puzzles.

Those would be significant challenges were there no competition, but ACT has made no secret of its intention to seek states’ Common Core assessment contracts—and Alabama may turn out to be the first of many to sign up. The College Board hasn’t (to my knowledge) announced itself yet, but testing insiders know that it’s lately been on a hiring binge—even luring key assessment developers from ACT—that surely points in this direction.

Will the ACT and College Board versions of Common Core assessments be true “next-generation” tests that probe deeper understanding and more sophisticated (“higher-order”) skills in more revealing ways? Will they be “adaptive” (via computer or otherwise) to kids at different levels of achievement or will they, like most of today’s tests (see discussion here at the seventeen-minute point), do a weak job of differentiating performance at the top and at the bottom of their range of difficulty? I do not know. But I do know that all of these accoutrements carry dollar costs that state assessment budgets may not be able to bear—and veteran testing firms are accustomed to cutting their cloth to fit the wearer’s dimensions.

I assume that scores and scales on the new assessments will be comparable across states (as are current ACT and SAT scores), but individual states will likely set their own “cut points” for purposes of grade-to-grade promotion and high school graduation. That’s tricky, however, if you’re serious about bona fide “career and college readiness,” which is a meaningless concept if it differs by state; what’s more, the new standards aren’t really worth the bother unless “proficiency” levels for every grade cumulate to a desired end-point by senior year. (I predict that, as with consortium-developed assessments, the ACT and College Board folks will recommend grade-specific proficiency scores that do cumulate in the intended way, but individual states will decide for themselves what signifies readiness for promotion and graduation.)

If I’m right that ACT and College Board scarf up much state business, there won’t be a lot left for the consortia—and they may founder. That would, of course, represent a considerable waste of federal dollars. On the other hand, it would remove from the Common Core debate (at least until NCLB-reauthorization time, if that day ever comes) the specter of Arne Duncan and Barack Obama clutching those standards to the federal bosom.

Besides, the consortia could remain useful, even if they don’t do assessments themselves. Neither ACT nor the College Board will want to alienate the many state leaders who have been earnestly advancing the consortium work, and these groups could readily convert into advisory and coordinating bodies that help member states implement and make sense out of the results on the new tests—and advise test developers and standard-setters alike on how their products work in the real world.

Time will tell. I might be jumping to premature prediction—and you may interpret these entrails differently than I do. Letters to the editor are cordially invited.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr.

This blog entry first appeared in the Fordham Institute’s Education Gadfly Weekly.

First, great teaching will matter more, not less, in the digital age. As we’ve written here and here, digital learning has the potential to level the educational playing field on learning the basics. As digital content gets better and better, students around the globe will be able to learn basic content and practice skills through this new medium.

In that flat world, what will differentiate outcomes is how motivated students are to undertake the work of learning; how well they tackle the inevitable barriers to achievement, including social and emotional challenges; and whether they move beyond the basics and engage in the higher-order learning that’s increasingly important for college, careers, and life. And how well that happens for students will depend on what it’s always hinged on: the effectiveness of the adults in their lives. For most students—and for nearly all whose parents struggled in school—the adults who tip the balance are teachers.

Second, digital learning has the potential to extend the reach of the nation’s excellent teachers to far more students than they can teach today. By adopting new school models that change teachers’ roles and use digital learning to save teachers’ time, schools can put great teachers in charge of more students’ learning and turbocharge the development and performance of all teachers working in teams. And they can pay teachers more, sustainably, for reaching more students. Like it has in other professions, technology can give teachers unprecedented career advancement and earning opportunities while boosting performance.

This won’t happen automatically. Schools could just replace teachers with laptops. They could use savings from digital learning for something other than paying teachers more. They could use saved time for something other than helping more students and developing excellent teaching teams. But if they do, the nation will miss out on the enormous opportunity created by digital learning: the opportunity to give all students access to excellent teachers, while transforming teaching into a high-paying, high-impact profession.

-Bryan Hassel and Emily Ayscue Hassel

I’m not interested in rehashing all of the usual debates. I do want to point out that there’s public, and then there’s “public.” In other words, some of the people expressing indignation, I suspect, may send their children to “public” schools that are much more “private” than most private schools. And starting in September, I will be one of those parents (as anyone who has read my book knows already).

Yes, it’s true: Wood Acres Elementary, in Bethesda, Maryland, is a “private public school”—a term that Janie Scull and I coined in a 2010 report for the Fordham Institute. These are “public” schools that serve virtually no poor students. They are open to anyone—anyone who can afford to live in their catchment zones, that is.

We found 2,800 such schools in America back then; I suspect the numbers haven’t changed much since.

But here’s what you might want to consider: New York City, where Haimson lives, has exactly zero such schools. Nashville, Tennessee, where Rhee’s daughters live, has exactly zero. The greater Washington, D.C., area, where many of us policy wonks live, has about seventy.

So before we “public school parents” cast the first stone, let’s get serious. Public schools can be just as exclusive—often more exclusive—than private schools. Government funding does not bestow upon such schools or their clients any higher moral position.

Capiche?

-Mike Petrilli

This blog entry first appeared on Flypaper.

Improving the caliber of our math and science teachers is essential to changing this picture.  A large body of evidence confirms that teacher effectiveness is a key determinant of students’ academic progress.  Indeed, it is likely the case that, as President Obama has said, “The quality of math and science teachers is the most important single factor influencing whether students will succeed or fail in science, technology, engineering and math.”

Unfortunately, the same labor-market trends that have made math and science skills increasingly valuable to students may make it increasingly difficult to attract teachers with the talent and training necessary to address the challenge.  Despite a recent wave of reform, the vast majority of school districts nationwide continue to pay teachers based on salary schedules that fail to differentiate among teachers based on their subject-area expertise.  To the extent that teachers with technical skills have better earnings opportunities in other industries, this approach can be expected to produce fewer – perhaps even a shortage – of qualified candidates for math and science teaching jobs.

Data consistently show schools struggling to recruit and retain effective candidates for teaching positions in these subjects.  In 2003-04, for example, 27 percent of schools with a math teaching vacancy reported that filling that vacancy was “very difficult” or ultimately unsuccessful, as compared with just four percent of schools with vacancies in elementary classrooms (see Figure 1).  Even taking into account the fact that general elementary vacancies are more common, schools were more than four times as likely to have a difficult or unsuccessful search in math.  The data on vacancies in the biological and physical sciences show much the same pattern.

Click to enlarge

Do these patterns reflect the nature of the job opportunities available to individuals with math and science skills in the broader economy?  To shed new light on this question, my Brookings colleague Matthew Chingos and I used a unique administrative database to follow the careers of almost 32,000 high school teachers employed by Florida public schools between the 2001-02 and 2006-07 school years, roughly 3,500 of whom left teaching for a new job in the state during that time.  Quarterly earnings data from the state’s unemployment insurance system enabled us to compare the earnings of teachers in different subject areas both while they were teaching and in their new careers. [1]

Figure 2 compares the earnings of math and science teachers to those of English teachers for the same group of teachers before and after they left the classroom. [2] Among those who left teaching for jobs other industries, math and science teachers earned 15 percent and 12 percent more, respectively, than did former English teachers after leaving.  While they were teaching, these same math and science teachers earned no more than English teachers. [3]

Click to enlarge

This pattern strongly suggests that any efforts by Florida districts to provide better pay for teachers in the high-demand subjects of math and science are insufficient to offset the differences in outside earnings opportunities across subject areas.  Although our evidence is limited to one state, data from other sources suggests that the same is true elsewhere.  For example, the Institute for Education Sciences reports that more than one-quarter of math and science teachers who left the profession in 2004-05 said that the opportunity to earn better salary and benefits was a “very important” or “extremely important” consideration, as compared with just 13 percent of teachers in other subject areas.

There is a strong case, then, for modifying teacher compensation systems to offer larger salaries for math and science teachers as a means to improve teacher quality—and student achievement—in these subjects.  This is not to say that compensation is the only factor influencing decisions to enter and remain in the profession.  Research conducted by the University of Pennsylvania’s Richard Ingersoll, among others, shows that general working conditions, the degree to which teachers have classroom autonomy, and other non-monetary factors are at least as important a consideration as salaries in explaining teacher attrition.  Yet ample evidence confirms that salary levels strongly influence on teachers’ career paths.

Unfortunately, while offering higher salaries to teachers in high-demand subject areas might initially appear to be less controversial than other forms of differentiated compensation such as merit pay, public opinion data suggests otherwise.  In the 2007 Education Next-Program on Education Policy and Governance survey, my colleagues and I found that just 33 percent of Americans would prefer to offer a larger salary increase to teachers “in subject areas where there are shortages, such as math and science” rather than a smaller salary increase to all teachers.  In contrast, a majority supported offering a larger salary increase to “teachers who work in challenging schools.”  A recent survey of teachers in Washington state conducted by the University of Washington-Bothell economist Dan Goldhaber similarly found that 59 percent of teachers opposed differentiating teacher compensation by subject area.

My conversations with current and former educators suggest that their reluctance to embrace higher salaries for math and science teachers stems in large part from a concern that this approach would imply that other subject areas are somehow less important – and that the contributions made by teachers in those subjects therefore have less value.  This concern is understandable.  Yet the outside labor market is a reality that school districts cannot simply ignore.  By not allowing teacher compensation to vary with outside earnings opportunities, we implicitly ask individuals with strong math and science skills to make a larger financial sacrifice to enter and remain in the profession.  It is students who lose out when too few of them prove willing to do so.

President Obama’s recent 2014 budget proposal includes $80 Million in competitive grants to support programs that recruit and train talented math and science educators for high-need schools and $35 Million to pilot a STEM Master Teacher Corps through which effective teachers in technical fields would be rewarded for taking on new leadership roles.  These proposals’ prospects in Congress of course remain uncertain.  Even if they are enacted, however, they will face an uphill battle absent broader reforms to teacher compensation systems—reforms that may be encouraged from Washington but will ultimately require action by state legislatures and local school boards.  Advocates in these venues seeking to make teacher compensation systems more rational—paying more to teachers with stronger outside earnings potential—will need to develop new strategies to overcome the opposition to the idea from both the public and the profession itself.

—Martin West

This blog entry first appeared on the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center Chalkboard.

Which is something approaching tragedy. It was Republicans, even conservatives, who first blazed the trail toward higher standards and rigorous accountability in education—the likes of Ronald Reagan, Bill Bennett, Lamar Alexander, and Jeb Bush. To cede this ground to Democrats is an enormous policy and political mistake.

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: The Common Core standards are worth supporting because they’re educationally solid. They are rigorous, they are traditional—one might even say they are “conservative.” They expect students to know their math facts, to read the nation’s founding documents, and to evaluate evidence and come to independent judgments. In all of these ways, they are miles better than three-quarters of the state standards they replaced—standards that hardly deserved the name and that often pushed the left-wing drivel that Common Core haters say they abhor.

No, they’re not perfect. They can be undermined by curriculum directors who assign teeny-bopper romances, sports bios, and car-repair manuals instead of the good stuff. (So can every single set of state standards in the land.) And yes, the Obama administration coerced states to adopt Common Core standards via the lure of Race to the Top dollars. Pass a resolution, as ALEC did, expressing outrage atthat.

Get it off your chest, but then get on with the serious business of making America’s schools competitive for the twenty-first century. The really troubling part of the RNC resolution, in fact, is not its justifiable outrage at the Obama administration’s role in the Common Core; it’s the RNC’s inane argument against standards-based reform writ large, with its alleged goal of “conforming American students to uniform (‘one size fits all’) achievement goals,” and to “standardize and control the education of our children so they will conform to a preconceived ‘normal.’”

Republicans used to stand for standards. We’re confident that once GOP governors and legislators have a chance to give this language a look, they will again.

—Mike Petrilli

This blog entry originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

To take maximum advantage of these new tools, though, we need to abandon the egg crate approach to education. Simply stacking one change on top of existing structures does not advance student learning or teacher engagement. In his book Schoolteacher, Dan Lortie describes the cellular structure of the American education system. In colonial times, teachers worked in one room schoolhouses and teachers were responsible for teaching all subjects and all ages. As schools grew, students were divided into age groups and assigned to different classrooms.

However, this alteration has not lead to dramatic changes in the teaching profession. Classrooms are stacked on top of each other like “egg crates.” Teachers are responsible for their own materials and rarely interact with each other. Today, parents have more options with private and charter schools. But basic instructional approaches rarely deviate from traditional methods.

The main force behind the cellular school is bureaucratic momentum. The egg crate model of schooling places unnecessary pressure on teachers. Assigning teachers a piece of turf upon which he or she is responsible for everything stifles collaboration. Policy makers ought to encourage teachers to gain expert knowledge in specific subjects and work with others on techniques. Teachers ought to serve as the leaders of flexible education communities where collaboration rather than isolation is the standard.

One of the most powerful ways to counteract inertia in the classroom is technologies that free teachers to collaborate. Imagine a school were teachers work in sync with each other to educate students. A place with teams of teachers with specialized skill sets working jointly to teach, develop curricula, and design specialized interventions. A school with a cafeteria where robots provided context based foreign language instruction, a computer lab where student’s student played games that both motivated and provided high quality instruction, and a library where students took micro-lessons through massive, online courses to reinforce learning. In such a school, students could direct much of their own learning.

We need policy changes that facilitate education innovation. In many public K-12 schools, rules designed for an agrarian or industrial world limit flexibility. School finance focuses on seat-time requirements and apportions money to schools based on the number of days students sit in a classroom. Grade promotion is based on time in class as opposed to skill mastery. We need more flexible structures that emphasize learning as opposed to time spent in classrooms.

In addition, some K-12 schools and colleges discourage distance learning by not allowing credit for those classes or taking money away from districts when their students enroll in distance courses. These types of policies discourage innovation and make it difficult for students to access valuable learning materials through new delivery systems.

Lawmakers need to update privacy rules to allow for more robust data collection. Districts should develop tools to store this data into existing education data warehouses. Educators must engage parents to get their feedback and earn their permission to use new assessment tools. These changes will enable new learning approaches and student assessment.

Technology can create a truly meritocratic education system. In the status quo, we assume that all students need the same amount of time in the classroom to learn the required material. Yet if a student can demonstrate mastery of course material through self-directed learning, then spending hundreds of hours in a high school class is a questionable policy. New assessment technologies can more precisely detect student mastery. Providing students with more opportunities to learn and to demonstrate proficiency will help teachers focus on problem-solving and helping students needing special assistance. Ending the egg crate will liberate both students and teachers.

Darrell West, vice president of Governance Studies and director of the Center for Technology Innovation at Brookings, and author of Digital Schools: How Technology Can Transform Schools. Joshua Bleiberg is a research assistant also with the Center for Technology Innovation.

PARCC and Smarter Balanced were designed to serve as the cornerstone of the new standards: They were to ensure that the new standards were actually taught, that we collectively set the expectations bar at college- and career-readiness, that states lost the incentive to lower their cut scores, and so on.

Alabama’s decision to drop out of both consortia and choose a battery of ACT exams is enormous. This is the “Plan B” that many states—concerned about the reliability and cost of the consortia-developed tests—have been looking for. It enables a state to remain committed to tough standards and rigorous assessments without putting all of their eggs in the basket of a fragile multi-state entity.

From this point forward, more and more states may reason that ACT is likelier to have its tests ready to go come spring 2015 at a price that is certain and without all of the potential problems inherent in a multi-state procurement-practice-policy initiative.

Translation: There’s a nontrivial chance that we’re about to see an exodus from PARCC and SB. If that happens, the implications will be profound and the questions numerous.

How many and which states remain? Will the consortia be financially sustainable? Will we be able to compare state results? Do states also start to fragment when it comes to the standards themselves?

To be clear, the ACT route may turn out to be equally (or even more) rigorous as the consortia. But this is a development that was not intended five years ago.

Lastly, one of the most fascinating aspects of this entire story is that, under this scenario, the testing consortia are ultimately undermined not by charges that they are part of an effort tantamount to unlawfully nationalizing curriculum but by the combination of a competing assessment system and state chiefs acting rationally.

—Andy Smarick

This blog entry first appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

While the reports reinforce just how tragically low-performing the state’s urban districts are, they also show that the preening of many leafy suburban communities is unwarranted. Said state commissioner Chris Cerf, this data “will make clear that there are a number of schools out there that perhaps are a little bit too satisfied with how they are doing when compared with how other schools serving similar populations are doing.”

In other words, lots of schools and districts brag about their AP and IB programs, graduation rates, and so forth. But when you look at their AP passage rates and SAT scores, you quickly see that things aren’t so rosy. Far fewer kids than thought are truly prepared for post-secondary work.

Then when you compare some of these contented schools to other schools serving student bodies with similar demographics, you see that they are actually significantly underperforming their peers.

This should serve as a wake-up call to lots of New Jersey communities. A number of states with sophisticated school-rating systems, like Florida, have been providing such warnings to middle-class and affluent areas for some time.

I’m hopeful that such efforts will force parents, teachers, administrators, and school boards to undertake some tough self-assessments. It would behoove them to do so now because a much harsher gauntlet is on the horizon.

In the spring of 2015—assuming that the two testing consortia hold together—states will administer the first round of Common Core–aligned assessments. If those tests end up true to their billing (meaning they are accurate predictors of college- and career-readiness), proficiency scores across the land will plummet (see today’s very good editorial from the NY Daily News and this WSJ piece on a boycott-threat in New York).

When those scores are publicly released in the summer of 2015, lots of parents are going to be looking for solutions. The reform community should have a response.

Unless there’s a clear playbook for how we should respond, the vacuum will be filled by excuses (The tests are wrong! Everything is fine!) and old, ineffective, but popular and establishment-friendly interventions (More spending! Reduce class sizes!).

If I were a state chief, I’d have a team, off to the side, working on this right now. We would be drafting new policies, working on communications plans, and much, much more.

The reform community has a well-known tool-kit for our most distressed schools. But a counterpart for our suburban schools is conspicuously missing.

Folks will be looking for answers soon.

So, what’s your Summer 2015 plan?

-Andy Smarick

This blog entry first appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

Behind the Headline
An Appeal to Authority
Education Next |Fall 2008

The American Indian Public Charter High School, which took first place in Jay Mathews’ rating of the U.S.’s most challenging high schools, has been threatened with closure by the Oakland school district because of financial irregularities. American Indian’s middle school was one of six highly effective urban schools profiled by David Whitman in his book Sweating the Small Stuff, which was the basis for an Ed Next article, “An Appeal to Authority.”

-Education Next

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• Although no specific location is required, we prefer that the communications manager be located in the Boston area.

• Interested candidates should send a cover letter and resume to Carol Peterson, Managing Editor, at peterson@fas.harvard.edu.

Well and good—because at the time of those decisions (and still today), Texas could boast strong standards in English language arts; so-so ones in math; solid assessments; and a forceful, results-based accountability system, including the tough part that state after state (including top-scoring Massachusetts) has shown to be key to actual achievement gains: requiring kids to pass the tests and meet the standards in order to graduate.

Then and now, Texas has a “default” high school curriculum designed to prepare students for college-level work and modern careers—the kind with futures—as well as a comprehensive set of end-of-course exams that they must pass en route to those diplomas. Taken seriously and implemented properly (including elementary and middle schools that prepare youngsters for these high school rigors), Texas has embarked on an education regimen that will truly deliver the results that a twenty-first century economy requires and that individuals need in order to afford themselves a solid shot at good jobs and rewarding careers.

All of which will start to unravel—and return Texas to a pre-reform era of educational mediocrity—if the legislature sends the governor the ill-conceived rollback measure that cleared the House last week.

Instead of today’s “4 x 4” default curriculum for high school students (four years each of English, math, science, and social studies), the norm for Texas teens would become an easier “foundation diploma” with thirteen required courses.

On its face, that may look like a modest rollback. What’s more insidious is that, by also scrapping ten of the state’s fifteen “end of course” exams, including those in almost all the tougher courses, Texas essentially forfeits uniform academic expectations and returns to the days when individual districts, schools, and teachers decided which students get diploma credit for which classes. That means standards will (again) vary widely from place to place and neither employers nor colleges will be sure which applicants truly possess what knowledge and skills. High school transcripts will be inscrutable and diplomas ambiguous. And since district superintendents will be tempted to offer only the courses that the state mandates, lots of young Texans—most of them likely poor or minority—will be left with no access to classes that would do the most to propel them to success in higher education and beyond.

No wonder the state’s major employers and university leaders oppose this measure. If the House version makes it into law, it will be because some don’t think the state’s sons and daughters can reach high standards. In the name of “local control,” Texas is stepping back toward a system that was inequitable, capricious, and inadequate.

Yes, fifteen end-of-course exams may have been too many. But five is too few, especially in a state that has chosen to shun the comparable assessments into which most of the country is heading. Without standard measuring sticks, schools and districts are apt (there’s much evidence on this, including a recent study by the National Center for Education Statistics) to put rigorous-sounding labels on easy courses—in essence, faking it. Statewide end-of-course exams are the best way to discourage this.

Much recent debate in Texas has focused on whether every high school student needs to pass “advanced algebra” en route to a diploma. The short answer is that this is nearly always necessary in order to enroll in college-level math without remediation. No, not every college student needs to take more math and not every high school student aspires to college. Indeed, the nationwide “college for everybody” push has gone too far, particularly if what’s meant is a classic four-year liberal-arts degree. But in today’s economy, even young people headed for industry need plenty of serious math. It’s irresponsible not to give all of them such career options—and irresponsible also to suppose that sixteen-year-olds are in the best position to make lifetime decisions that they may later regret.

Yes, they—with the assent of parent and guidance counselor—should be able to opt out of such courses. But the default should assume that everyone otherwise takes them. And the state’s assessment system should provide evidence that the courses are real, not fancy titles affixed to simple content that might be easy to pass in the short run but won’t get credit from the real world in the long run.

The bill that cleared the House the other day did make one improvement: The state’s accountability system will give individual schools parent-friendly letter grades from A to F rather than using complex terminology to designate a school’s status. And academic achievement will continue to figure in those designations. The problem is that bobtailing the assessment system means far less information will be available by which to determine how much achievement is actually occurring.

I hope, for the sake of millions of school-kids in our second-most-populous state—and for that state’s future—that the legislature sets this right before it reaches Governor Perry’s desk. So many worthy education reforms are in play in Austin today—reforms that add up, if wisdom prevails, to a needed comprehensive overhaul of Texas K–12 education—that it would be a particular pity if the quality standards that should undergird everything else are themselves badly weakened.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr.

A shorter version of this piece appeared in the Houston Chronicle.

Unless Secretary Duncan can be prevailed upon to reconsider, decades of education policy will be overturned and a federal agency will have assumed authority that should remain squarely in the hands of Congress.

A group of California districts have jointly applied for an NCLB accountability waiver. So far only states have had proposals approved. It’s not the consortium’s application that’s noteworthy; it’s that the feds are taking it seriously. (Duncan evidently encouraged them, and the submission has been forwarded to peer reviewers.)

There’s very good reason to deny the application on the merits. The proposed accountability system relies too heavily on non-academic measures, sets the expectations bar too low, has weak interventions, and, most troubling, trusts districts to hold themselves accountable. (Grave concerns about the plan’s achievement gap implications have been raised by, among others, a former Bush administration official and Ed Trust’s head.)

But regardless of its contents, this application—and similar district-accountability waiver requests—should be denied for two reasons.

First, for years America has maintained an intricate K–12 accountability framework, with states playing lead. I never realized how critical this was until I worked for an SEA.

Under state constitutions, state governments have responsibility for public education. Districts are creatures of state law—a delivery mechanism of a state obligation. When courts determine funding is insufficient or results are unacceptable, they turn to the state.

This has led to an elaborate edifice of policies and practices with the state at the fulcrum. States adopt content standards and administer end-of-year assessments. States set proficiency cut scores, require interventions, and certify teachers. They monitor the implementation of state and federal policies and the distribution of state and federal funds.

Because of these authorities and responsibilities, states are the primary drivers of reform. Governors in the 1980s were able to advance the standards movement because state governments were the locus of K–12 power. Today’s exceptional state chiefs are able to lead Common Core implementation, common-assessment transitions, educator-evaluation reform, and much more, largely because of the leverage provided by state accountability systems.

For decades, the federal government, through the congressionally approved ESEA, has supported the K–12 accountability framework described above. Even the audacious NCLB respected state authority, having states make decisions about standards, assessments, interventions, and more.

Indeed, the CORE proposal admits that its “application is unique given the lack of direct involvement from the state education agency;” it seeks to “build a new system of accountability” and give participating districts authority “rather than simply comply[ing] with state-level decisions.”

States like Massachusetts and Florida made substantial achievement progress over the last 20 years because of rigorous statewide reform plans.

The Department must recognize that this structure buckles when the state is removed as the cornerstone. A unitary accountability system enables the state to fairly and transparently monitor program compliance and inform the public about performance; make difficult decisions about withholding funds, intervening with local boards, and taking over schools and districts; and uniformly and thoroughly administer federal programs.

It’s difficult to overstate the confusion introduced and leverage lost should the Department create a novel district-federal accountability relationship.

The second reason for denying district waivers is that approval would constitute a worrisome level of presumptuousness by an executive-branch agency.

The decision to grant state ESEA waivers unquestionably pushed the limits of administrative authority. But at least state waivers maintained the basic architecture provided by the underlying federal law.

Granting district waivers to circumvent state-level accountability not only overturns NCLB, it upends the core of ESEA accountability. That is not within an administration’s discretion. If that’s to happen, it should be the culmination of a deliberative congressional process, not the product of a unilateral executive-branch decree.

Anyone familiar with the NCLB provision cited as the authority for state waivers or the statutory language that gave rise to Race to the Top knows this Department is, shall we say, expansive when deducing its powers. (The New York Times called the state waiver strategy “the most sweeping use of executive authority to rewrite federal education law” since the 1960s.)

One can only wonder how the late Sen. Robert Byrd—jealous defender of congressional prerogatives—would’ve reacted upon hearing Secretary Duncan’s brash ultimatum, “If Congress doesn’t act, we will.”

But even Congress’s most vociferous NCLB detractors and most passionate local-control advocates should bristle at the idea of district accountability waivers. U.S. Senator and former Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander questioned the Department’s authority to grant this type of waiver. One state superintendent said it “undermines states;” another called it an “affront.”

So far, it appears that the Department is relying on two defenses: First, there’s a history of district-federal relationships; and second, they’ve given districts waivers on other matters.

But both underscore my point.

Existing district-federal relationships are based on grants, not accountability systems. And approved district waivers are for narrow matters like SES and test types; again, that’s very different than a new district-driven accountability system.

I take the Department at its word that it would prefer to work with states. But a state’s refusal to take the federal government’s bait doesn’t empower the Department to then negotiate a superseding deal with its districts. The Department should not bypass the state’s constitutionally empowered education authority, override decades of precedent, and brush aside the intent of ESEA’s accountability framework because a state didn’t do what the Secretary wanted.

Now the Department has a predicament. Secretary Duncan, having encouraged CORE and needled Congress, may feel pot-committed to approving the proposal. Like a young Orwell with the elephant, he may be compelled to see to conclusion an unfortunate progression of events he set in motion.

Now is the moment for the architects and leaders of our decades-old system of accountability to step up—CCSSO, NGA, members of Congress, former senior Department officials, civil rights advocates. It might require a series of sotto voce conversations with the Secretary and a jointly signed public letter.

The message can be simple: Mr. Secretary, on other matters, your boldness has served you well. But this is a bridge too far. Drastic change isn’t always a virtue.

Mr. Secretary, please don’t do it. What many of your predecessors have built and maintained over years shouldn’t be undone by the stroke of your lone pen.

—Andy Smarick

This blog entry first appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

The U.S. and the U.K. were both awakening to being “nations at risk,” due in no small part to the parlous state of their public education systems, and reformers in both countries were pushing for big changes—changes that their respective “education establishments” didn’t want to make.

On both sides of the sea, standards, assessments, accountability, and school choice were surfacing as ideas, and becoming policies and programs. The teachers’ unions didn’t want any of this, but it was beginning to happen anyway, as was the gradual disempowerment of what the Brits call “local education authorities”—and the delegation of greater authority to the school level.

It happened faster on their shores, mostly because the central government in London wasn’t gridlocked—the Tories were in firm control at the time—and because its decisions were (and still are) the ones that counted. (At least in K–12 education, the British government resembles one of our state governments more than our federal government.)

Here’s a good summary of the U.K.’s 1988 Education Reform Act, perhaps the high-water mark of “Thatcherism in education,” and its aftermath. (This was written in 2004 by Christopher Woodhead, who served as Britain’s chief inspector of schools in the late ’90s.)

It has been 16 years since Britain’s Conservative government under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher introduced the Education Reform Act. The law created a national curriculum for all state-supported schools as well as a national system of student testing and school inspections. The act was a determined attempt to diminish the power of local education authorities (which are similar to America’s school districts) and to devolve resources and responsibility for meeting national standards to individual schools. And it has been seven years since the Labor Party and its prime minister, Tony Blair, came to power, pledging to raise standards with a blitz of initiatives and reforms. Labor’s proposals included introducing national literacy and numeracy strategies in order to improve the learning of basic skills; establishing Education Action Zones that would encourage local businesses to work with schools; funding after-school homework groups; creating courses in citizenship; revising the national curriculum; and setting up a task force of leading educators to advise on new reforms.

Observe the continuing reform momentum under Blair, due in no small part to the solid work of Michael Barber at Downing Street, which continues today under David Cameron and his nonstop, visionary education minister Michael Gove.

Yes, there have been hiccups and alterations along the way, many for the better, some not. (Read onward in that 2004 account by Chris Woodhead and you will find much dissatisfaction.) And no, the educational outcomes still aren’t where they need to be. But this also parallels our experience in the United States: continuing in the right direction toward reform, making some mid-course corrections, with more effort still needed.

On her side of the Atlantic, this three-decade reform enterprise really did start with Margaret Thatcher, and I doubt it would have continued through changes of party, prime minister, and education ministers had the movement not been fundamentally right-headed, as she was on pretty nearly everything she touched.

Allow me the privilege of one brief anecdote. Toward the end of Mrs. Thatcher’s time as prime minister, several other American men and I, finding ourselves married to prominent, hard-charging women, formed an imaginary group we dubbed the “Denis Thatcher Society.” It never actually did anything but was a continuing source of merriment and teasing for ourselves and our estimable wives.

It so happened, a couple of years after Lady Thatcher re-entered civilian life, that most of us were invited to an event in D.C. in her honor. Her husband accompanied her. Over a glass of wine, in an effort to make small talk, we told him of the society we had founded in his honor. Big mistake. Sir Denis was not amused. It could not have been amusing much of the time to be her husband, either.

But what a legacy she has left. It’s hard to picture Margaret Thatcher “resting in peace,” but it’s important for those who cherish her memory to know that her impact was felt and appreciated far beyond the borders of her own land.

—Chester E. Finn, Jr.

This blog entry first appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

In her new book, Follow the Money: How Foundation Dollars Change Public School Politics, Sarah Reckhow picks up where I left off. She provides a much deeper and quite thorough consideration of the potential and pitfalls of philanthropic giving in public education. Reckhow confirms that total foundation giving to K–12 education may exceed $1 billion, which sounds like a lot of money, but relative to the almost $600 billion spent annually on public education, it is actually a very small percentage.

Reckhow shows that large foundations have recognized the need to focus on influencing how public monies are spent, and that they are now devoting a significantly larger share of their giving on policy advocacy. Around the same time that I was recommending that donors shift their efforts toward policy influence, many large foundations were already making the change. Reckhow’s careful analysis of foundation tax filings shows direct giving to public schools dropped dramatically between 2000 and 2005, while giving to policy-advocacy efforts rose sharply.

Reckhow extends this analysis by warning us that shifting to policy advocacy won’t necessarily result in policy success, especially on an enduring basis. Foundations are tempted to concentrate their advocacy efforts in locations where there is centralized control over policy decisions. She empirically demonstrates that districts with mayoral or state control have been much more likely to attract foundation giving. It’s like one-stop shopping; foundations can get policy change while devoting fewer resources if they have to persuade fewer agencies or policymakers to embrace their preferred reforms.

But what happens when there is a personnel change among the central authorities? Eventually there will be a Pharaoh who knows not Joseph. Without building authentic and lasting support among local constituencies, philanthropic dreams of policy change may be ephemeral.

Reckhow illustrates this danger by contrasting the reform strategies in New York City and Los Angeles. In New York City, mayoral control was fully achieved. Through both network modeling and extensive interviews, Reckhow is able to show that reform-oriented philanthropists concentrated their efforts in New York on a relatively narrow band of elites to advance their policy agenda. In Los Angeles, by contrast, education policy decision-making is more decentralized and diffuse. In Los Angeles, reform-oriented donors were forced to expand their efforts to cultivate support among a broader set of constituencies.

New York City may have been easier, faster, and cheaper for reform-oriented foundations to accomplish their goals, but that speed came at a price. The support for reform policies is so narrow in New York City that Reckhow doubts it will survive for long after Mayor Michael Bloomberg leaves office at the end of this year. In Los Angeles, extensive efforts to build a base of support among a diversity of constituencies may help protect those reforms even with changes in political control of the district. To be clear, Reckhow does not provide evidence that Los Angeles’ reforms are lasting better than New York’s; her analysis leads her to expect that New York reforms rest on a thin and unsteady foundation and may not endure.

Reckhow is clearly advising foundations to avoid top-down reform strategies, but the largest foundations are not heeding her advice. Many have decided to up the ante on centralization. Mayoral or state control is no longer enough. They need national control. They are now focused on implementing the Common Core state standards with aligned national tests upon which teacher evaluation will increasingly rest. Federal policy, through Race to the Top financial incentives and selective offers of waivers to NCLB requirements, is pushing this centralizing strategy forward. If large foundations can build and control a national machinery to shape education policy nationwide, then they have no reason to worry about how broadly based support is for their preferred policies. As long as national elites favor their agenda, they hope that the national machine they are constructing can force policies from the very top all the way down to every classroom.

Reckhow’s implication is that this national reform machine is doomed to fail. Either state and local education authorities will resist the national reforms before they can be completed, or they will ignore and subvert policies that actually go into effect. Millions of teachers and thousands of schools cannot all be monitored and compelled from the top. Reckhow’s lesson is that enduring and successful reforms require a broad and deep base of support, which top-down reform efforts are failing to develop.

Of course, there is an alternative to trying to convince the education establishment to buy into reform. Donors could mobilize the most important yet most ignored constituency of all: parents. By expanding parental choices in schools, foundations can engage parents very effectively in controlling education policies.

Top-down reform strategies, such as merit pay or high-stakes testing, may be fragile, too vulnerable to shifts in the political winds. Once Bloomberg leaves office, who will fight to keep merit pay or high-stakes testing in place in the Big Apple? Bottom-up strategies, however, are more robust. Movements like school choice grow their own base of support. Once parents have good choices of schools, they are much more likely to fight efforts to take them away.

Reckhow thinks donors should court unions, community activists, and local leaders, but she fails to consider building the base of support for reform at the even more fundamental level of parents. Engaging parents in education reform through school choice may take longer, but no one involved in education reform should fool themselves into thinking that real and enduring reform can be done quickly. Donors need the wisdom and evidence that a book like Follow the Money can offer—but they also need the patience to do the job right.

-Jay P. Greene

This review was first published in Philanthropy Magazine.

Behind the Headline
The British Experience
Education Next |Summer 2004

Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s first female prime minister, has died. Christopher Woodhead, who served as Britain’s chief inspector of schools from 1994-2000, wrote for Ed Next about the Education Reform Act introduced by Britain’s Conservative government under Thatcher and about what went wrong with attempts to implement the Act.

-Education Next

This year marks the 30^th anniversary of the publication of How Schools Work by Rebecca Barr and Robert Dreeben, a book in which ability grouping plays an important role.  I became aware of the book at the University of Chicago in 1988 as a Ph.D. student. Robert Dreeben was my program advisor and dissertation chair.

Ability grouping is one method by which educators differentiate instruction. The term “differentiation” refers to the many ways that schools try to tailor different learning experiences to children’s varying levels of performance. In the 1980s, I earned a masters degree in special education and taught both learning handicapped and gifted students. Differentiation was in my blood when I arrived at Chicago.

Differentiation was also under fire. Ability grouping and tracking were becoming taboo. The popular research at that time, which was predominantly qualitative and impressionistic, condemned tracking and ability grouping for harming black, Hispanic, and economically disadvantaged students. This literature often depicted teachers as stupid or evil: stupid by robotically following tradition and unwittingly imposing harmful practices on students; evil by harboring race- or class-based prejudices that manifested in low expectations for many kids.

That is what made How Schools Work so refreshing. The book honors teachers in a profound way, not in a “you are all saints and we love you” way, but in a manner much more meaningful—by studying teachers’ work.  Barr and Dreeben followed a group of Chicago first grade teachers as they taught reading. A wealth of data was collected so that hypotheses could be tested empirically.  In How Schools Work, readers discover that first grade reading groups operate within a grand organizational scheme: groups nested in classrooms, classrooms housed within schools, schools situated within a big urban district. Seemingly routine tasks of teaching are transformed into thoughtful, important activities. Teachers do not appear to be stupid or evil. They appear to be professionals engaged in purposeful activities.

In 1988, “The Formation and Instruction of Ability Groups,” was published in the American Journal of Education. Adam Gamoran, a Chicago graduate student at the time, worked on the project producing this paper. Dreeben and Barr describe as “technological” the ways in which teachers form groups and then instruct them; not technological in the sense of using computers or electronic media but in the sense of applying craft knowledge in the pursuit of an occupational end, in this case, the goal of organizing a classroom full of first graders so that they can be taught how to read.

The notion that teaching is primarily intuitive (“teachers are born not made”) was directly refuted.  When they teach reading, teachers must juggle four inputs, each with its own constraints –student aptitude, the difficulty of reading materials, time devoted to instruction, and coverage of curriculum. The combination of these four inputs must be expertly managed to optimize learning. Sure, sometimes teachers have to fly by the seat of their pants while teaching, but for most of time, they employ craft knowledge to attain just the right mix. Kids do in fact learn how to read, and first grade, more than any other grade, is where that wonderful accomplishment can be observed while it happens.

Teachers aren’t perfect. They can make mistakes. They can form groups that are too large, too small, or too unwieldy in composition; move groups too fast or too slow; teach from a curriculum that is too demanding or too easy; or fail to provide enough time for instruction. They can also be unfair – even bigoted – but that’s not the norm.

It is heartening to note that as the use of ability grouping is increasing a new generation of researchers is bringing sophisticated statistical techniques (and open minds) to bear on questions involving both ability grouping and tracking. Tracking, the middle and high school practice of grouping students into separate classes as opposed to grouping students within a class, has always drawn the most scholarly attention. And the most opprobrium.

In a recent NBER working paper, Courtney A. Collins and Li Gan classify Dallas schools as sorted or non-sorted based on the heterogeneity of classes in math or reading achievement. The study also considers heterogeneity in the dispersion of students identified as gifted and talented, limited English speaking, or special education. Sorting is found to produce significantly positive effects in both reading and math — and for both high and low achievers. The researchers conclude:

This study has valuable policy implications because unlike many school policy variables, the composition of classes can often be changed with little need for increased funds. A school with a fixed number of classrooms and teachers can increase efficiency by rearranging students in the most effective way possible. This study suggests that creating classes with lower levels of dispersion of score or ability level may improve the achievement outcomes for students across the score distribution (Collins and Gan, 2013, page 20).

The study joins a long line of research dating back to at least the 1920s. The overriding concerns have been to determine whether tracking and ability grouping are good or bad (whether they produce positive effects) and whether they are equitable (even if some students benefit, is it at the expense of others). The evidence on these questions is mixed. To adequately summarize the literature would require a series of posts, and I will return to this topic in the future. The main point I would like to make in concluding this post pertains to the renewed popularity of tracking and ability grouping, not to whether either practice is warranted by research.

In the late 1980s and into the 1990s, powerful groups condemned ability grouping and tracking, among them, the National Governors Association, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and the Children’s Defense Fund. The use of ability grouping dropped significantly in the 1990s. Tracking in middle schools declined in all subjects but math.  According to the NAEP data reported in the Brown Center Report, ability grouping has made a strong comeback in the past decade.

The resurgence of ability grouping accentuates the need for new research questions. If educators are going to use ability grouping again, how should they employ this tool so as to maximize potential benefits and minimize potential harms? How large should groups be? How many groups should a teacher create, and how much time should be spent with each one? Do low achieving groups require more direct instruction than high achieving groups? How often should students be assessed and regrouped?  Are different curricula more effective with different groups? Notice the thrust of these inquiries. Such questions are directed towards producing new knowledge on the craft of teaching and to guide teachers in improving their practice, not towards the policy question of whether to group or not to group.

A fine example of this kind of study is provided by Carol McDonald Connor and colleagues at Florida State University. The researchers conducted a randomized field trial of software that organizes first grade reading instruction. The algorithm employed by the software considers each child’s entering skill level and progress made during the school year to recommend several dimensions of instruction, including assignment to small, homogenous ability groups, the amount of time spent on code- versus meaning-focused literacy, and teacher/child versus child-managed delivery. The targets for these recommendations are dynamic; that is, they change in response to periodic assessment of children’s progress. Children in the experimental classrooms gained about two months in reading achievement over those in the control group.

I hope the new generation of researchers will take up more questions like those in the FSU study. The debate over tracking and ability grouping has gone on for nearly a century. Research has not answered the key questions in dispute, at least not to the protagonists’ satisfaction. It’s time for some different questions. How should researchers proceed? A good place to start is reading How Schools Work. It’s just as fresh and illuminating today as when it was published thirty years ago.

-Tom Loveless

Tom Loveless is a senior fellow in Governance Studies at Brookings.

This blog entry first appeared on the Brown Center Chalkboard at the Brookings Institution.

And while one can hope that Atlanta was an outlier in terms of the scope and longevity of its cheating conspiracy, it’s hardly an isolated case, as examples from El Paso, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and other locales demonstrate.

As expected, test critics are having a field day, using Atlanta as evidence of why all this must go. They yearn to throw the accountability baby out with the testing bathwater. But they’re wrong. The better approach is to “mend it, not end it.”

Try this thought experiment: What would happen if U.S. schools ceased all standardized testing—and related consequences? No more annual assessments, no more grading schools based on the results, no more interventions in low-performing schools, no more teacher evaluations tied to test scores, no more “merit pay” for high performing teachers or job jeopardy for low performers.

The result: In our most affluent communities, little would change. Schools would continue to drive toward the real-world standard of college acceptance at elite universities, via Advanced Placement exams and high SAT scores.

At schools serving both rich and poor kids, we would probably see a return to the 1990s, when achievement gaps were overlooked, wealthy students were guided toward rigorous coursework and “college readiness,” while poorer pupils were shepherded into easier classes with less challenge and weaker teachers.

And in high-poverty schools—the main target of twenty years of reform and the primary drivers of America’s improved student achievement since the 1990s—a few might keep pushing students toward college and good jobs, but many would return to the “soft bigotry of low expectations” and be satisfied with getting their students to graduation day, whether or not they learned much along the way.

I can’t prove that my forecast would come true, but the burden rests on those who want to eliminate testing and accountability to provide assurance that the system won’t revert back to its bad old ways.

If ending testing and accountability carries huge risks, what might mending it look like?

First, we should embrace testing as a diagnostic tool, not just an accountability weapon. We should get feedback into teachers’ hands much faster and make sure the tests themselves are of higher quality. All of this is the aim of the Common Core assessments currently under development, to be ready for prime time in 2015.

Second—and this is obvious—we need to invest in better test security. The Common Core assessments will be online, closing off current cheating strategies (like erasing and replacing answers on bubble sheets), but surely opening some new avenues. States need to spend the money to make sure test results can be trusted and cheaters can’t succeed.

Third, targets (for schools, students, and teachers) should be challenging but attainable. One source of the cheating scandals was educators feeling that fraud was literally the only way to produce the scores demanded by the system. They might have been right. The focus should transition to achievement growth over time, rather than hitting a particular “cut score.” (Many state accountability systems have moved in this direction recently, thanks to Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s waiver process.)

And fourth, official rankings or grades (of schools or teachers) should be informed by test scores but also leavened by human judgment. School grades might be conferred by British-style inspectors who look at pupil achievement along with much else.

And teacher evaluations should be the province of school principals, who should consider test scores as one set of data among many. The use of human judgment is particularly important if consequences are attached—closing schools, for example, or giving extra pay to great teachers, or terminating poor ones. (In this case, Duncan’s mandate for states to develop formula-driven teacher evaluations is a step in the wrong direction.)

Testing and accountability, properly conceived and implemented, can still be important tools in improving achievement and opportunity in America. Let’s keep the good, throw out the bad, and extinguish the anti-testing fire that started in Atlanta.

-Mike Petrilli

UPDATE: Joanne Weiss, Arne Duncan’s Chief of Staff, wrote to make this clarification: “Federal policy doesn’t require ‘formula-driven teacher evaluations,’ only that student growth be a significant consideration in the evaluation, and that evaluations should consist of multiple measures. We don’t stipulate any weights or formulas, nor do we require their use. Further, human judgment is critical to any good evaluation system. While it’s true that many states have implemented formula-driven evaluation systems (often including human judgment factors, like teacher observations and school/community contribution as part of the ‘formula’), we have no such requirements in our policies or regulations.”

This article first appeared in the New York Daily News.